summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/38035.txt
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to '38035.txt')
-rw-r--r--38035.txt19550
1 files changed, 19550 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/38035.txt b/38035.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2424d63
--- /dev/null
+++ b/38035.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,19550 @@
+Project Gutenberg's The Letters of Henry James, Vol. II, by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Letters of Henry James, Vol. II
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Editor: Percy Lubbock
+
+Release Date: November 16, 2011 [EBook #38035]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES, V.2 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: _Henry James._
+
+_1912._]
+
+
+
+
+/*
+THE LETTERS
+OF
+HENRY JAMES
+
+SELECTED AND EDITED BY
+PERCY LUBBOCK
+
+VOLUME II
+
+NEW YORK
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+1920
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+*/
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+/*
+VI. RYE (_continued_): 1904-1909 PAGE
+
+PREFACE 1
+
+LETTERS:
+
+To W. D. Howells 8
+
+To Edward Lee Childe 10
+
+To W. E. Norris 12
+
+To Mrs. Julian Sturgis 14
+
+To J. B. Pinker 15
+
+To Henry James, junior 16
+
+To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 18
+
+To Edmund Gosse 19
+
+To W. E. Norris 22
+
+To Edmund Gosse 24
+
+To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 29
+
+To Edward Warren 31
+
+To Mrs. William James 32
+
+To William James 34
+
+To Miss Margaret James 36
+
+To H. G. Wells 37
+
+To William James 42
+
+To W. E. Norris 45
+
+To Paul Harvey 47
+
+To William James 50
+
+To William James 52
+
+To Miss Margaret James 53
+
+To Mrs. Dew-Smith 55
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 56
+
+To W. E. Norris 58
+
+To Thomas Sergeant Perry 61
+
+To Gaillard T. Lapsley 62
+
+To Bruce Porter 65
+
+To Miss Grace Norton 67
+
+To William James, junior 71
+
+To Howard Sturgis 72
+
+To Howard Sturgis 74
+
+To Madame Wagniere 76
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 78
+
+To Miss Gwenllian Palgrave 81
+
+To William James 82
+
+To W. E. Norris 84
+
+To W. E. Norris 87
+
+To Dr. and Mrs. J. William White 88
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 90
+
+To Gaillard T. Lapsley 92
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 94
+
+To Henry James, junior 96
+
+To W. D. Howells 98
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 104
+
+To J. B. Pinker 105
+
+To Miss Ellen Emmet 107
+
+To George Abbot James 110
+
+To Hugh Walpole 112
+
+To George Abbot James 113
+
+To W. E. Norris 114
+
+To Mrs. Henry White 117
+
+To W. D. Howells 118
+
+To Edward Lee Childe 120
+
+To Hugh Walpole 122
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 123
+
+To Arthur Christopher Benson 125
+
+To Charles Sayle 127
+
+To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 129
+
+To Miss Grace Norton 131
+
+To William James 134
+
+To H. G. Wells 137
+
+To Miss Henrietta Reubell 139
+
+To William James 140
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 142
+
+To Madame Wagniere 144
+
+To Thomas Sergeant Perry 146
+
+To Owen Wister 148
+
+
+VII. RYE AND CHELSEA: 1910-1914
+
+PREFACE 151
+
+LETTERS:
+
+To T. Bailey Saunders 155
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 156
+
+To Miss Jessie Allen 158
+
+To Mrs. Bigelow 159
+
+To W. E. Norris 160
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 161
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 163
+
+To Bruce Porter 164
+
+To Miss Grace Norton 165
+
+To Thomas Sergeant Perry 167
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 168
+
+To Mrs. Charles Hunter 170
+
+To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 171
+
+To W. E. Norris 173
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 175
+
+To Miss Rhoda Broughton 178
+
+To H. G. Wells 180
+
+To C. E. Wheeler 183
+
+To Dr. J. William White 184
+
+To T. Bailey Saunders 186
+
+To Sir T. H. Warren 188
+
+To Miss Ellen Emmet (Mrs. Blanchard Rand) 189
+
+To Howard Sturgis 192
+
+To Mrs. William James 194
+
+To Mrs. John L. Gardner 195
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 197
+
+To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan 199
+
+To Miss Alice Runnells 201
+
+To Mrs. Frederic Harrison 202
+
+To Miss Theodora Bosanquet 204
+
+To Mrs. William James 205
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 208
+
+To W. E. Norris 211
+
+To Miss M. Betham Edwards 213
+
+To Wilfred Sheridan 215
+
+To Walter V. R. Berry 217
+
+To W. D. Howells 221
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 227
+
+To H. G. Wells 229
+
+To Lady Bell 231
+
+To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 234
+
+To Hugh Walpole 236
+
+To Miss Rhoda Broughton 238
+
+To Henry James, junior 239
+
+To R. W. Chapman 241
+
+To Hugh Walpole 244
+
+To Edmund Gosse 246
+
+To Edmund Gosse 248
+
+To Edmund Gosse 250
+
+To Edmund Gosse 252
+
+To Edmund Gosse 255
+
+To Edmund Gosse 257
+
+To H. G. Wells 261
+
+To Mrs. Humphry Ward 264
+
+To Mrs. Humphry Ward 265
+
+To Gaillard T. Lapsley 267
+
+To John Bailey 269
+
+To Dr. J. William White 272
+
+To Edmund Gosse 274
+
+To Mrs. Bigelow 278
+
+To Robert C. Witt 280
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 281
+
+To A. F. de Navarro 286
+
+To Henry James, junior 288
+
+To Miss Grace Norton 293
+
+To Mrs. Henry White 296
+
+To Mrs. William James 299
+
+To Bruce Porter 302
+
+To Lady Ritchie 304
+
+To Mrs. William James 305
+
+To Percy Lubbock 310
+
+To Two Hundred and Seventy Friends 311
+
+To Mrs. G. W. Prothero 313
+
+To William James, junior 314
+
+To Miss Rhoda Broughton 317
+
+To Mrs. Alfred Sutro 319
+
+To Hugh Walpole 322
+
+To Mrs. Archibald Grove 324
+
+To William Roughead 327
+
+To Mrs. William James 329
+
+To Howard Sturgis 330
+
+To Mrs. G. W. Prothero 332
+
+To H. G. Wells 333
+
+To Logan Pearsall Smith 337
+
+To C. Hagberg Wright 339
+
+To Robert Bridges 341
+
+To Andre Raffalovich 343
+
+To Henry James, junior 345
+
+To Edmund Gosse 348
+
+To Bruce L. Richmond 350
+
+To Hugh Walpole 352
+
+To Compton Mackenzie 354
+
+To William Roughead 356
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 357
+
+To Dr. J. William White 358
+
+To Henry Adams 360
+
+To Mrs. William James 361
+
+To Arthur Christopher Benson 364
+
+To Mrs. Humphry Ward 366
+
+To Thomas Sergeant Perry 367
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 369
+
+To William Roughead 371
+
+To William Roughead 373
+
+To Mrs. Alfred Sutro 375
+
+To Sir Claude Phillips 376
+
+
+VIII. THE WAR 1914-1916
+
+PREFACE 379
+
+LETTERS:
+
+To Howard Sturgis 382
+
+To Henry James, junior 385
+
+To Mrs. Alfred Sutro 387
+
+To Miss Rhoda Broughton 389
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 391
+
+To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 392
+
+To William James, junior 394
+
+To Mrs. W. K. Clifford 397
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 399
+
+To Mrs. R. W. Gilder 401
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 403
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 405
+
+To Mrs. T. S. Perry 406
+
+To Miss Rhoda Broughton 408
+
+To Edmund Gosse 409
+
+To Miss Grace Norton 412
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 414
+
+To Thomas Sergeant Perry 416
+
+To Henry James, junior 419
+
+To Hugh Walpole 423
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 425
+
+To Mrs. T. S. Perry 427
+
+To Edmund Gosse 430
+
+To Miss Grace Norton 431
+
+To Mrs. Dacre Vincent 434
+
+To the Hon. Evan Charteris 436
+
+To Compton Mackenzie 437
+
+To Miss Elizabeth Norton 441
+
+To Hugh Walpole 444
+
+To Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge 447
+
+To Mrs. William James 449
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 452
+
+To the Hon. Evan Charteris 453
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 456
+
+To Thomas Sergeant Perry 459
+
+To Edward Marsh 462
+
+To Edward Marsh 464
+
+To Mrs. Wharton 465
+
+To Edward Marsh 468
+
+To G. W. Prothero 469
+
+To Wilfred Sheridan 470
+
+To Edward Marsh 472
+
+To Edward Marsh 474
+
+To Compton Mackenzie 475
+
+To Henry James, junior 477
+
+To Edmund Gosse 480
+
+To J. B. Pinker 482
+
+To Frederic Harrison 483
+
+To H. G. Wells 485
+
+To H. G. Wells 487
+
+To Henry James, junior 490
+
+To Edmund Gosse 492
+
+To John S. Sargent 493
+
+To Wilfred Sheridan 494
+
+To Edmund Gosse 496
+
+To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan 499
+
+To Hugh Walpole 501
+
+INDEX 503
+*/
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY
+E. O. HOPPE _Frontispiece_
+
+PAGE OF "THE AMERICAN" (ORIGINAL
+VERSION) AS REVISED BY HENRY
+JAMES, 1906 _to face page 70._
+*/
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+RYE (_continued_)
+
+(1904-1909)
+
+
+The much-debated visit to America took place at last in 1904, and in ten
+very full months Henry James secured that renewed saturation in American
+experience which he desired before it should be too late for his
+advantage. He saw far more of his country in these months than he had
+ever seen in old days. He went with the definite purpose of writing a
+book of impressions, and these were to be principally the impressions of
+a "restored absentee," reviving the sunken and overlaid memories of his
+youth. But his memories were practically of New York, Newport and Boston
+only; to the country beyond he came for the most part as a complete
+stranger; and his voyage of new discovery proved of an interest as great
+as that which he found in revisiting ancient haunts. The American Scene,
+rather than the letters he was able to write in the midst of such a stir
+of movement, gives his account of the adventure. On the spot the daily
+assault of sensation, besetting him wherever he turned, was too
+insistent for deliberate report; he quickly saw that his book would have
+to be postponed for calmer hours at home; and his letters are those of a
+man almost overwhelmed by the amount that is being thrown upon his
+power of absorption. But the book he eventually wrote shews how fully
+that power was equal to it all--losing or wasting none of it, meeting
+and reacting to every moment. Ten months of America poured into his
+imagination, as he intended they should, a vast mass of strange
+material--the familiar part of it now after so many years the strangest
+of all, perhaps; and his imagination worked upon it in one unbroken rage
+of interest. He was now more than sixty years old, but for such
+adventures of perception and discrimination his strength was greater
+than ever.
+
+He sailed from England at the end of August, 1904, and spent most of the
+autumn with William James and his family, first at Chocorua, their
+country-home in the mountains of New Hampshire, and then at Cambridge.
+The rule he had made in advance against the paying of other visits was
+abandoned at once; he was in the centre of too many friendships and too
+many opportunities for extending and enlarging them. With Cambridge
+still as his headquarters he widely improved his knowledge of New
+England, which had never reached far into the countryside. At Christmas
+he was in New York--the place that was much more his home, as he still
+felt, than Boston had ever become, yet of all his American past the most
+unrecognisable relic in the portentous changes of twenty years. He
+struck south, through Philadelphia and Washington, in the hope of
+meeting the early Virginian spring; but it happened to be a year of
+unusually late snows, and his impressions of the southern country, most
+of which was quite unknown to him, were unfortunately marred. He found
+the right sub-tropical benignity in Florida, but a particular series of
+engagements brought him back after a brief stay. It had been natural
+that he should be invited to celebrate his return to America by
+lecturing in public; but that he should do so, and even with enjoyment,
+was more surprising, and particularly so to himself. He began by
+delivering a discourse on "The Lesson of Balzac"--a closely wrought
+critical study, very attractive in form and tone--at Bryn Mawr College,
+Pennsylvania, and was immediately solicited to repeat it elsewhere. He
+did this in the course of the winter at various other places, so
+providing himself at once with the means and the occasion for much more
+travel and observation than he had expected. By Chicago, St. Louis, and
+Indianapolis he reached California in April, 1905. "The Lesson of
+Balzac" was given several times, until for a second visit to Bryn Mawr
+he wrote another paper, "The Question of our Speech"--an amusing and
+forcible appeal for care in the treatment of spoken English. The two
+lectures were afterwards published in America, but have not appeared in
+England.
+
+The beauty and amenity of California was an unexpected revelation to
+him, and it is clear that his experience of the west, though it only
+lasted for a few weeks, was fully as fruitful as all that had gone
+before. Unluckily he did not write the continuation of The American
+Scene, which was to have carried the record on from Florida to the
+Pacific coast; so that this part of his journey is only to be followed
+in a few hurried letters of the time. He was soon back in the east, at
+New York and Cambridge again, beginning by now to feel that the cup of
+his sensations was all but as full as it would hold. The longing to
+discharge it into prose before it had lost its freshness grew daily
+stronger; a year's absence from his work had almost tired him out. But
+he paid several last visits before sailing for home, and it was
+definitely in this American summer that he acquired a taste which was to
+bring him an immensity of pleasure on repeated occasions for the rest of
+his life. The use of the motor-car for wide and leisurely sweeps
+through summer scenery was from now onward an interest and a delight to
+which many friends were glad to help him--in New England at this time,
+later on at home, in France and in Italy. It renewed the romance of
+travel for him, revealing fresh aspects in the scenes of old wanderings,
+and he enjoyed the opportunity of sinking into the deep background of
+country life, which only came to him with emancipation from the railway.
+
+He reached Lamb House again in August, 1905, and immediately set to work
+on his American book. It grew at such a rate that he presently found he
+had filled a large volume without nearly exhausting his material; but by
+that time the whole experience seemed remote and faint, and he felt it
+impossible to go further with it. The wreckage of San Francisco,
+moreover, by the great earthquake and fire of 1906, drove his own
+Californian recollections still further from his mind. He left The
+American Scene a fragment, therefore, and turned to another occupation
+which engaged him very closely for the next two years. This was the
+preparation of the revised and collected edition of his works, or at
+least of so much of his fiction as he could find room for in a limited
+number of volumes. To read his own books was an entirely new amusement
+to him; they had always been rigidly thrust out of sight from the moment
+they were finished and done with; and he came back now to his early
+novels with a perfectly detached critical curiosity. He took each of
+them in hand and plunged into the enormous toil, not indeed of modifying
+its substance in any way--where he was dissatisfied with the substance
+he rejected it altogether--but of bringing its surface, every syllable
+of its diction, to the level of his exigent taste. At the same time, in
+the prefaces to the various volumes, he wrote what became in the end a
+complete exposition of his theory of the art of fiction, intertwined
+with the memories of past labour that he found everywhere in the
+much-forgotten pages. It all represented a great expenditure of time and
+trouble, besides the postponement of new work; and there is no doubt
+that he was deeply disappointed by the half-hearted welcome that the
+edition met with after all, schooled as he was in such discouragements.
+
+While he was on this work he scarcely stirred from Lamb House except for
+occasional interludes of a few weeks in London; and it was not until the
+spring of 1907 that he allowed himself a real holiday. He then went
+abroad for three months, beginning with a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Wharton
+in Paris and a motor-tour with them over a large part of western and
+southern France. With all his French experience, Paris of the Faubourg
+St. Germain and France of the remote country-roads were alike almost new
+to him, and the whole episode was matter of the finest sort for his
+imagination. From The American to The Ambassadors he had written scores
+of pages about Paris, but none more romantic than a paragraph or two of
+The Velvet Glove, in which he recorded an impression of this time--a
+sight of the quays and the Seine on a blue and silver April night. From
+Paris he passed on to his last visit, as it proved, to his beloved
+Italy. It was the tenth he had made since his settlement in England in
+1876. Like every one else, perhaps, who has ever known Rome in youth, he
+found Rome violated and vulgarised in his age, but here too the friendly
+"chariot of fire" helped him to a new range of discoveries at Subiaco,
+Monte Cassino, and in the Capuan plain. He spent a few days at a
+friend's house on the mountain-slope below Vallombrosa, and a few more,
+the best of all, in Venice, at the ever-glorious Palazzo Barbaro. That
+was the end of Italy, but he was again in Paris for a short while in the
+following spring, 1908, motoring thither from Amiens with his hostess
+of the year before.
+
+Meanwhile his return to continuous work on fiction, still ardently
+desired by him, had been further postponed by a recrudescence of his old
+theatrical ambitions, stimulated, no doubt, by the comparative failure
+of the laborious edition of his works. He had taken no active step
+himself, but certain advances had been made to him from the world of the
+theatre, and with a mixture of motives he responded so far as to revise
+and re-cast a couple of his earlier plays and to write a new one. The
+one-act "Covering End" (which had appeared in The Two Magics, disguised
+as a short story) became "The High Bid," in three acts; it was produced
+by Mr. and Mrs. Forbes Robertson at Edinburgh in March, 1908, and
+repeated by them in London in the following February, for a few
+afternoon performances at His Majesty's Theatre. "The Other House," a
+play dating from a dozen years back which also had seen the light only
+as a narrative, was taken in hand again with a view to its production by
+another company, and "The Outcry" was written for a third. The two
+latter schemes were not carried out in the end, chiefly on account of
+the troubled time of illness which fell on Henry James with the
+beginning of 1910 and which made it necessary for him to lay aside all
+work for many months. But this new intrusion of the theatre into his
+life was happily a much less agitating incident than his earlier
+experience of the same sort; his expectations were now fewer and his
+composure was more securely based. The misfortune was that again a
+considerable space of time was lost to the novel--and in particular to
+the novel of American life that he had designed to be one of the results
+of his year of repatriation. The blissful hours of dictation in the
+garden-house at Rye were interrupted while he was at work on the plays;
+he found he could compass the concision of the play-form only by writing
+with his own hand, foregoing the temptation to expand and develop which
+came while he created aloud. But his keenest wish was to get back to the
+novel once more, and he was clearing the way to it at the end of 1909
+when all his plans were overturned by a long and distressing illness. He
+never reached the American novel until four years later, and he did not
+live to finish it.
+
+
+
+
+_To W. D. Howells._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+Jan. 8th, 1904.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Howells,
+*/
+
+I am infinitely beholden to you for two good letters, the second of
+which has come in to-day, following close on the heels of the first and
+greeting me most benevolently as I rise from the couch of solitary pain.
+Which means nothing worse than that I have been in bed with odious and
+inconvenient gout, and have but just tumbled out to deal, by this
+helpful machinery, with dreadful arrears of Christmas and New Year's
+correspondence. Not yet at my ease for writing, I thus inflict on you
+without apology this unwonted grace of legibility.
+
+It warms my heart, verily, to hear from you in so encouraging and
+sustaining a sense--in fact makes me cast to the winds all timorous
+doubt of the energy of my intention. I know now more than ever how much
+I want to "go"--and also a good deal of why. Surely it will be a
+blessing to commune with you face to face, since it is such a comfort
+and a cheer to do so even across the wild winter sea. Will you kindly
+say to Harvey for me that I shall have much pleasure in talking with him
+here of the question of something serialistic in the North American, and
+will broach the matter of an "American" novel in _no_ other way until I
+see him. It comes home to me much, in truth, that, after my immensely
+long absence, I am not quite in a position to answer in advance for the
+quantity and quality, the exact form and colour, of my "reaction" in
+presence of the native phenomena. I only feel tolerably confident that a
+reaction of some sort there will be. What affects me as
+indispensable--or rather what I am conscious of as a great personal
+desire--is some such energy of direct _action_ as will enable me to
+cross the country and see California, and also have a look at the South.
+I am hungry for Material, whatever I may be moved to do with it; and,
+honestly, I think, there will not be an inch or an ounce of it unlikely
+to prove grist to my intellectual and "artistic" mill. You speak of
+one's possible "hates" and loves--that is aversions and tendernesses--in
+the dire confrontation; but I seem to feel, about myself, that I proceed
+but scantly, in these chill years, by those particular categories and
+rebounds; in short that, somehow, such fine primitive passions _lose_
+themselves for me in the act of contemplation, or at any rate in the act
+of reproduction. However, you are much more passionate than I, and I
+will wait upon _your_ words, and try and learn from you a little to be
+shocked and charmed in the right places. What mainly appals me is the
+idea of going a good many months without a quiet corner to do my daily
+stint; so much so in fact that this is quite unthinkable, and that I
+shall only have courage to advance by nursing the dream of a sky-parlour
+of some sort, in some cranny or crevice of the continent, in which my
+mornings shall remain my own, my little trickle of prose eventuate, and
+my distracted reason thereby maintain its seat. If some gifted creature
+only wanted to exchange with me for six or eight months and "swap" its
+customary bower, over there, for dear little Lamb House here, a really
+delicious residence, the trick would be easily played. However, I see I
+must wait for all tricks. This is all, or almost all, to-day--all except
+to reassure you of the pleasure you give me by your remarks about the
+_Ambassadors_ and cognate topics. The "International" is very presumably
+indeed, and in fact quite inevitably, what I am _chronically_ booked
+for, so that truly, even, I feel it rather a pity, in view of your so
+benevolent colloquy with Harvey, that a longish thing I am just
+finishing should not be _disponible_ for the N.A.R. niche; the niche
+that I like very much the best, for serialisation, of all possible
+niches. But "The Golden Bowl" isn't, alas, so employable....
+Fortunately, however, I still cling to the belief that there are as good
+fish in the sea--that is, _my_ sea!... You mention to me a domestic
+event--in Pilla's life--which interests me scarce the less for my having
+taken it for granted. But I bless you all. Yours always,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edward Lee Childe._
+
+
+/#
+ The name of this friend, an American long settled in France, has
+ already occurred (vol. i. p. 50) in connection with H. J.'s early
+ residence in Paris. Mr. Childe (who died in 1911) is known as the
+ biographer of his uncle, General Robert E. Lee, Commander of the
+ Confederate forces in the American Civil War.
+#/
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+January 19th, 1904.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear old Friend,
+*/
+
+...You write in no high spirits--over our general _milieu_ or moment;
+but high spirits are not the accompaniment of mature wisdom, and yours
+are doubtless as good as mine. Like yourself, I put in long periods in
+the country, which on the whole (on this mild and rather picturesque
+south coast) I find in my late afternoon of life, a good and salutary
+friend. And I haven't your solace of companionship--I dwell in
+singleness save for an occasional imported visitor--who is usually of a
+sex, however, not materially to mitigate my celibacy! I have a small--a
+very nice perch in London, to which I sometimes go--in a week or two,
+for instance, for two or three months. But I return hither, always, with
+zest--from the too many people and things and words and motions--into
+the peaceful possession of (as I grow older) my more and more precious
+home hours. I have a household of good books, and reading tends to take
+for me the place of experience--or rather to _become_ itself (pour qui
+sait lire) experience concentrated. You will say this is a dull picture,
+but I cultivate dulness in a world grown too noisy. Besides, as an
+antidote to it, I have committed myself to going some time this year to
+America--my first expedition thither for 21 years. If I do go (and it is
+inevitable,) I shall stay six or eight months--and shall be probably
+much and variously impressed and interested. But I am already gloating
+over the sentiments with which I shall expatriate myself here.
+
+You ask what is being published and "thought" here--to which I reply
+that England never was the land of ideas, and that it is now less so
+than ever. Morley's Life of Gladstone, in three big volumes, is
+formidable, but rich, and is very well done; a type of frank,
+exhaustive, intimate biography, such as has been often well produced
+here, but much less in France: partly, perhaps, because so much cannot
+be told about the lives--private lives--of the grands hommes there. Of
+course the book is largely a history of English politics for the last 50
+years--but very human and vivid. As for talk, I hear very little--none
+in this rusticity; but if I pay a visit of three days, as I do
+occasionally, I become aware that the Free Traders and the
+Chamberlainites _s'entredevorent_. The question bristles for me, with
+the rebarbative; but my prejudices and dearest traditions are all on the
+side of the system that has "made England great"--and everything I am
+most in sympathy with in the country appears to be still on the side of
+it, notably the better--the best--sort of the _younger_ men. Chamberlain
+hasn't in the least captured these.... But it's the midnight hour, and
+my fire, while I write, has gone out. I return again, most heartily,
+your salutation; I send the friendliest greeting to Mrs. Lee Childe and
+to the dear old Perthuis, well remembered of me, and very tenderly, and
+I am, my dear Childe, your very faithful old friend,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To W. E. Norris._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+January 27th, 1904.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Norris,
+*/
+
+I have as usual a charming letter from you too long unanswered; and my
+sense of this is the sharper as, in spite of your eccentric
+demonstration of your--that is of _our_ disparities, or whatever (or at
+least of your lurid implication of them,) it all comes round, after all,
+to our having infinitely much in common. For I too am making
+arrangements to be "cremated," and my mind keeps yours company in
+whatever pensive hovering yours may indulge in over the graceful
+operations at Woking. If you will only agree to postpone these, on your
+own part, to the latest really convenient date, I would quite agree to
+testify to our union of friendship by availing myself of the same
+occasion (it might come cheaper for two!) and undergoing the process
+_with_ you. I find I do desire, from the moment the question becomes a
+really practical one, to throw it as far into the future as possible.
+Save at the frequent moments when I desire to die very _soon_, almost
+immediately, I cling to life and propose to make it last. I blush for
+the frivolity, but there are still so many things I want to do! I give
+you more or less an illustration of this, I feel, when I tell you that I
+go up to town tomorrow, for eight or ten weeks, and that I believe I
+have made arrangements (or incurred the making of them by others) to
+meet Rhoda Broughton in the evening (a peine arrive) at dinner. But I
+shall make in fact a shorter winter's end stay than usual, for I have
+really committed myself to what is for me a great adventure later in the
+year; I have _taken_ my passage for the U.S. toward the end of August,
+and with that long absence ahead of me I shall have to sit tight in the
+interval. So I shall come back early in April, to begin to "pack," at
+least morally; and the moral preparation will (as well as the material)
+be the greater as it's definitely visible to me that I must, if
+possible, let this house for the six or nine months....
+
+But what a sprawling scrawl I have written you! And it's long past
+midnight. Good morning! Everything else I meant to say (though there
+isn't much) is crowded out.
+
+/*
+Yours always and ever,
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Julian Sturgis._
+
+/#
+ Julian Sturgis, novelist and poet, a friend of H. J.'s by many
+ ties, had died on the day this letter was written.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
+April 13, 1904.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Mrs. Julian,
+*/
+
+I ask myself how I can write to you and yet how I cannot, for my heart
+is full of the tenderest and most compassionate thought of you, and I
+can't but vainly say so. And I feel myself thinking _as_ tenderly of
+him, and of the laceration of his consciousness of leaving you and his
+boys, of giving you up and ceasing to be for you what he so devotedly
+was. And that makes me pity him more than words can say--with the
+wretchedness of one's not having been able to contribute to help or save
+him. But there he is in his sacrifice--a beautiful, noble, stainless
+memory, without the shadow upon him, or the shadow of a shadow, of a
+single grossness or meanness or ugliness--the world's dust on the nature
+of thousands of men. Everything that was high and charming in him comes
+out as one holds on to him, and when I think of my friendship of so many
+years with him I see it all as fairness and felicity. And then I think
+of _your_ admirable years and I find no words for your loss. I only
+desire to keep near you and remain more than ever yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+TO J. B. PINKER.
+
+/#
+ Mr. Pinker was now acting, as he continued to do till the end, as
+ H. J.'s literary agent. This letter refers to _The Golden Bowl_.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+May 20th, 1904.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Mr. Pinker,
+*/
+
+I will indeed let you have the whole of my MS. on the very first
+possible day, now not far off; but I have still, absolutely, to finish,
+and to finish right.... I have been working on the book with unremitting
+intensity the whole of every blessed morning since I began it, some
+thirteen months ago, and I am at present within but some twelve or
+fifteen thousand words of Finis. But I can work only in my own way--a
+deucedly good one, by the same token!--and am producing the best book, I
+seem to conceive, that I have ever done. I have really done it fast, for
+what it is, and for the way I do it--_the_ way I seem condemned to;
+which is to _overtreat_ my subject by developments and amplifications
+that have, in large part, eventually to be greatly compressed, but to
+the prior operation of which the thing afterwards owes what is most
+durable in its quality. I have written, in perfection, 200,000 words of
+the G.B.--with the rarest perfection!--and you can imagine how much of
+that, which has taken time, has had to come out. It is not, assuredly,
+an economical way of work in the short run, but it is, for me, in the
+long; and at any rate one can proceed but in one's own manner. My manner
+however is, at present, to be making every day--it is now a question of
+a very moderate number of days--a straight step nearer my last page,
+comparatively close at hand. You shall have it, I repeat, with the very
+minimum further delay of which I am capable. I do not seem to know, by
+the way, _when_ it is Methuen's desire that the volume shall appear--I
+mean after the postponements we have had. The best time for me, I think,
+especially in America, will be about next October, and I promise you the
+thing in distinct time for that. But you will say that I am
+"over-treating" this subject too! Believe me yours ever,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Henry James, junior._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+July 26th, 1904.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest H.
+*/
+
+Your letter from Chocorua, received a day or two ago, has a rare charm
+and value for me, and in fact brings to my eyes tears of gratitude and
+appreciation! I can't tell you how I thank you for offering me your
+manly breast to hurl myself upon in the event of my alighting on the New
+York dock, four or five weeks hence, in abject and craven terror--which
+I foresee as a certainty; so that I accept without shame or scruple the
+beautiful and blessed offer of aid and comfort that you make me. I have
+it at heart to notify you that you will in all probability bitterly
+repent of your generosity, and that I shall be sure to become for you a
+dead-weight of the first water, the most awful burden, nuisance,
+parasite, pestilence and plaster that you have ever known. But this
+said, I prepare even now to _me cramponner_ to you like grim death,
+trusting to you for everything and invoking you from moment to moment as
+my providence and saviour. I go on assuming that I shall get off from
+Southampton in the Kaiser Wilhelm II, of the North German Lloyd line, on
+August 24th--the said ship being, I believe, a "five-day" boat, which
+usually gets in sometime on the Monday. Of course it will be a nuisance
+to you, my arriving in New York--if I do arrive; but that got itself
+perversely and fatefully settled some time ago, and has now to be
+accepted as of the essence. Since you ask me what my desire is likely to
+he, I haven't a minute's hesitation in speaking of it as a probable
+frantic yearning to get off to Chocorua, or at least to Boston and its
+neighbourhood, by the very first possible train, and it may be on the
+said Monday. I shall not have much heart for interposing other things,
+nor any patience for it to speak of, so long as I hang off from your
+mountain home; yet, at the same time, if the boat should get in late,
+and it were possible to catch the Connecticut train, I believe I could
+bend my spirit to go for a couple of days to the Emmets', _on the
+condition that you can go with me_. So, and so only, could I think of
+doing it. Very kindly, therefore, let them know this, by wire or
+otherwise, in advance, and determine for me yourself whichever you think
+the best move. Grace Norton writes me from Kirkland Street that she
+expects me _there_, and Mrs. J. Gardner writes me from Brookline that
+_she_ absolutely counts on me; in consequence of all of which I beseech
+you to hold on to me tight and put me through as much as possible like
+an express parcel, paying 50 cents and taking a brass check for me. I
+shall write you again next month, and meanwhile I'm delighted at the
+prospect of your being able to spend September in the mountain home. I
+have all along been counting on that as a matter of course, but now I
+see it was fatuous to do so--and yet rejoice but the more that this is
+in your power.... But good-night, dearest H.--with many caresses all
+round, ever your affectionate
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
+
+
+/*
+Chocorua, N.H., U.S.A.
+
+September 16th, 1904.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear, dear Lucy C.!
+*/
+
+One's too dreadful--I receive your note and your wire of August 23rd, in
+far New England, under another sky and in _such_ another world. I don't
+know by what deviltry I missed them at the _last_, save by that of the
+Reform being closed for cleaning and the use of the _Union_ (other Club)
+fraught with other errors and delays. But the Wednesday a.m. at Waterloo
+was horrible for crowd and confusion (passengers for ship so in their
+_thousands_,) and I can't be sorry you weren't in the crush (mainly of
+rich German-American Jews!) But that is ancient history, and the worst
+of this, now, here, is that, spent with letter-writing (my American
+postbag swollen to dreadfulness, more and more, and interviewers only
+kept at bay till I get to Boston and New York,) I can only make you
+to-night this incoherent signal, waiting till some less burdened hour to
+be more decent and more vivid. I came straight up here (where I have
+been just a fortnight,) and these New Hampshire mountains, forests,
+lakes, are of a beauty that I hadn't (from my 18th-20th years) dared to
+remember as so great. And such _golden_ September weather--though
+already turning to what the leaf enclosed (picked but by reaching out of
+window) is a very poor specimen of. It is a pure bucolic and Arcadian,
+wildly informal and un-"frilled" life--but sweet to me after long
+years--and with many such good old homely, farmy New England things to
+eat! Yet a she-interviewer pushed into it yesterday all the way from New
+York, 400 _miles_, and we ten miles from a station, on the mere _chance_
+of me, and I took pity and _your_ advice, and surrendered to her more
+or less, on condition that I shouldn't have to read her stuff--and I
+_shan't_! So you see I am well _in_--and to-morrow I go to other places
+(one by one) and shall be in deeper. It's a vast, queer, wonderful
+country--too unspeakable as yet, and of which this is but a speck on the
+hem of the garment! Forgive this poverty of wearied pen to your good old
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edmund Gosse._
+
+
+/*
+The Mount,
+Lenox, Mass.
+
+October 27th, 1904.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Gosse,
+*/
+
+The weeks have been many and crowded since I received, not very many
+days after my arrival, your incisive letter from the depths of the so
+different world (from this here;) but it's just because they have been
+so animated, peopled and pervaded, that they have rushed by like
+loud-puffing motor-cars, passing out of my sight before I could step
+back out of the dust and the noise long enough to dash you off such a
+response as I could fling after them to be carried to you. And during my
+first three or four here my postbag was enormously--appallingly--heavy:
+I almost turned tail and re-embarked at the sight of it. And then I
+wanted above all, before writing you, to make myself a notion of how,
+and where, and even _what_, I was. I have turned round now a good many
+times, though still, for two months, only in this corner of a corner of
+a corner, that is round New England; and the postbag has, happily,
+shrunken a good bit (though with liabilities, I fear, of re-expanding,)
+and this exquisite Indian summer day sleeps upon these really admirable
+little Massachusetts mountains, lakes and woods, in a way that lulls my
+perpetual sense of precipitation. I have moved from my own fireside for
+long years so little (have been abroad, till now, but once, for ten
+years previous) that the mere quantity of movement remains something of
+a terror and a paralysis to me--though I am getting to brave it, and to
+like it, as the sense of adventure, of holiday and romance, and above
+all of the great so visible and observable world that stretches before
+one more and more, comes through and makes the tone of one's days and
+the counterpoise of one's homesickness. I am, at the back of my head and
+at the bottom of my heart, transcendently homesick, and with a
+sustaining private reference, all the while (at every moment, verily,)
+to the fact that I have a tight anchorage, a definite little downward
+burrow, in the ancient world--a secret consciousness that I chink in my
+pocket as if it were a fortune in a handful of silver. But, with this, I
+have a most charming and interesting time, and [am] seeing, feeling, how
+agreeable it is, in the maturity of age, to revisit the long neglected
+and long unseen land of one's birth--especially when that land affects
+one as such a living and breathing and feeling and moving great monster
+as this one is. It is all very interesting and quite unexpectedly and
+almost uncannily delightful and sympathetic--partly, or largely from my
+intense impression (all this glorious golden autumn, with weather like
+tinkling crystal and colours like molten jewels) of the sweetness of the
+country itself, this New England rural vastness, which is all that I've
+seen. I've been only in the country--shamelessly visiting and almost
+only old friends and scattered relations--but have found it far more
+beautiful and amiable than I had ever dreamed, or than I ventured to
+remember. I had seen too little, in fact, of old, to have anything, to
+speak of, to remember--so that seeing so many charming things for the
+first time I quite thrill with the romance of elderly and belated
+discovery. Of Boston I haven't even had a full day--of N.Y. but three
+hours, and I have seen nothing whatever, thank heaven, of the "littery"
+world. I have spent a few days at Cambridge, Mass., with my brother, and
+have been greatly struck with the way that in the last 25 years Harvard
+has come to mass so much larger and to have gathered about her such a
+swarm of distinguished specialists and such a big organization of
+learning. This impression is increased this year by the crowd of foreign
+experts of sorts (mainly philosophic etc.) who have been at the St.
+Louis congress and who appear to be turning up overwhelmingly under my
+brother's roof--but who will have vanished, I hope, when I go to spend
+the month of November with him--when I shall see something of the goodly
+Boston. The blot on my vision and the shadow on my path is that I have
+contracted to write a book of Notes--without which contraction I simply
+couldn't have come; and that the conditions of life, time, space,
+movement etc. (really to _see_, to get one's material,) are such as to
+threaten utterly to frustrate for me any prospect of simultaneous
+work--which is the rock on which I may split altogether--wherefore my
+alarm is great and my project much disconcerted; for I have as yet
+scarce dipped into the great Basin at all. Only a large measure of Time
+can help me--to do anything as decent as I want: wherefore pray for me
+constantly; and all the more that if I can only arrive at a means of
+application (for I see, already, from here, my _Tone_) I shall do,
+verily, a lovely book. I am interested, up to my eyes--at least I think
+I am! But you will fear, at this rate, that I am trying the book on you
+already. I _may_ have to return to England only as a saturated sponge
+and wring myself out there. I hope meanwhile that your own saturations,
+and Mrs. Nelly's, prosper, and that the Pyrenean, in particular,
+continued rich and ample. If you are having the easy part of your year
+now, I hope you are finding in it the lordliest, or rather the
+_un_lordliest leisure.... I commend you all to felicity and am, my dear
+Gosse, yours always,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To W. E. Norris._
+
+
+/*
+Boston.
+
+[Dec. 15, 1904.]
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Norris,
+*/
+
+There is nothing to which I find my situation in this great country less
+favourable than to this order of communication; yet I greatly wish, 1st,
+to thank you for your beautiful letter of as long ago as Sept. 12th
+(from Malvern,) and 2nd, not to fail of having some decent word of
+greeting on your table for Xmas morning. The conditions of time and
+space, at this distance, are such as to make nice calculations
+difficult, and I shall probably be frustrated of the felicity of
+dropping on you by exactly the right post. But I send you my
+affectionate blessing and I aspire, at the most, to lurk modestly in the
+Heap. You were in exile (very elegant exile, I rather judge) when you
+last wrote, but you will now, I take it, be breathing again bland
+Torquay (_bland_, not blond)--a process having, to my fancy, a certain
+analogy and consonance with that of quaffing bland Tokay. This is
+neither Tokay nor Torquay--this slightly arduous process, or adventure,
+of mine, though very nearly as expensive, on the whole, as both of those
+luxuries combined. I am just now amusing myself with bringing the
+expense up to the point of ruin by having come back to Boston, after an
+escape (temporary, to New York,) to conclude a terrible episode with
+the Dentist--which is turning out an abyss of torture and tedium. I am
+promised (and shall probably enjoy) prodigious results from it--but the
+experience, the whole business, has been so fundamental and complicated
+that anguish and dismay _only_ attend it while it goes on--embellished
+at the most by an opportunity to admire the miracles of American
+expertness. These are truly a revelation and my tormentor a great
+artist, but he will have made a cruelly deep dark hole in my time (very
+precious for me here) and in my pocket--the latter of such a nature that
+I fear no patching of all my pockets to come will ever stop the leak.
+But meanwhile it has all made me feel quite domesticated, consciously
+assimilated to the system; I am losing the precious sense that
+everything is strange (which I began by hugging close,) and it is only
+when I know I am quite whiningly homesick _en dessous_, for L.H. and
+Pall Mall, that I remember I am but a creature of the surface. The
+surface, however, has its points; New York is appalling, fantastically
+charmless and elaborately dire; but Boston has quality and convenience,
+and now that one sees American life in the longer piece one profits by
+many of its ingenuities. The winter, as yet, is radiant and bell-like
+(in its frosty clearness;) the diffusion of warmth, indoors, is a signal
+comfort, extraordinarily comfortable in the travelling, by day--I don't
+go in for nights; and a marvel the perfect organisation of the universal
+telephone (with interviews and contacts that begin in 2 minutes and
+settle all things in them;) a marvel, I call it, for a person who hates
+notewriting as I do--but an exquisite curse when it isn't an exquisite
+blessing. I expect to be free to return to N.Y., the formidable in a few
+days--where I shall inevitably have to stay another month; after which I
+hope for sweeter things--Washington, which is amusing, and the South,
+and eventually California--with, probably, Mexico. But many things are
+indefinite--only I shall probably stay till the end of June. I suppose I
+am much interested--for the time passes inordinately fast. Also the
+country is _unlike_ any other--to one's sensation of it; those of
+Europe, from State to State, seem to me less different from each other
+than they are all different from this--or rather this from them. But
+forgive a fatigued and obscure scrawl. I am really _done_ and
+demoralized with my interminable surgical (for it comes to that) ordeal.
+Yet I wish you heartily all peace and plenty and am yours, my dear
+Norris, very constantly,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edmund Gosse._
+
+
+/*
+The Breakers Hotel,
+Palm Beach,
+Florida.
+
+February 16th, 1905.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Gosse,
+*/
+
+I seem to myself to be (under the disadvantage of this extraordinary
+process of "seeing" my native country) perpetually writing letters; and
+yet I blush with the consciousness of not having yet got round to _you_
+again--since the arrival of your so genial New Year's greeting. I have
+been lately in constant, or at least in very frequent, motion, on this
+large comprehensive scale, and the right hours of _recueillement_ and
+meditation, of private communication, in short, are very hard to seize.
+And when one does seize them, as you know, one is almost crushed by the
+sense of accumulated and congested matter. So I won't attempt to remount
+the stream of time save the most sketchily in the world. It was from
+Lenox, Mass., I think, in the far-away prehistoric autumn, that I last
+wrote you. I reverted thence to Boston, or rather, mainly, to my
+brother's kindly roof at Cambridge, hard by--where, alas, my five or six
+weeks were harrowed and ravaged by an appalling experience of American
+transcendent _Dentistry_--a deep dark abyss, a trap of anguish and
+expense, into which I sank unwarily (though, I now begin to see, to my
+great profit in the short human hereafter,) of which I have not yet
+touched the _fin fond_. (I mention it as accounting for treasures of
+wrecked _time_--I could do nothing else whatever in the state into which
+I was put, while the long ordeal went on: and this has left me belated
+as to everything--"work," correspondence, impressions, progress through
+the land.) But I was (temporarily) liberated at last, and fled to New
+York, where I passed three or four appalled midwinter weeks (Dec. and
+early Jan.;) appalled, mainly, I mean, by the ferocious discomfort this
+season of unprecedented snow and ice puts on in that altogether
+unspeakable city--from which I fled in turn to Philadelphia and
+Washington. (I am going back to N.Y. for three or four weeks of
+developed spring--I haven't yet (in a manner) seen it or cowardly "done"
+it.) Things and places southward have been more manageable--save that I
+lately spent a week of all but polar rigour at the high-perched
+Biltmore, in North Carolina, the extraordinary colossal French chateau
+of George Vanderbilt in the said N.C. mountains--the house 2500 feet in
+air, and a thing of the high Rothschild manner, but of a size to contain
+two or three Mentmores and Waddesdons.... Philadelphia and Washington
+would yield me a wild range of anecdote for you were we face to
+face--will yield it me then; but I can only glance and pass--glance at
+the extraordinary and rather personally-fascinating President--who was
+kind to me, as was dear J. Hay even more, and wondrous, blooming,
+aspiring little Jusserand, all pleasant welcome and hospitality. But I
+liked poor dear queer flat comfortable Philadelphia almost ridiculously
+(for what it is--extraordinarily _cossu_ and materially civilized,) and
+saw there a good deal of your friend--as I think she is--Agnes Repplier,
+whom I liked for her bravery and (almost) brilliancy. (You'll be glad to
+hear that she is extraordinarily better, up to now, these two years, of
+the malady by which her future appeared so compromised.) However, I am
+tracing my progress on a scale, and the hours melt away--and my letter
+mustn't grow out of my control. I have worked down here, yearningly, and
+for all too short a stay--but ten days in all; but Florida, at this
+southernmost tip, or almost, does beguile and gratify me--giving me my
+first and last (evidently) sense of the tropics, or _a peu pres_, the
+subtropics, and revealing to me a blandness in nature of which I had no
+idea. This is an amazing winter-resort--the well-to-do in their tens,
+their hundreds, of thousands, from all over the land; the property of a
+single enlightened despot, the creator of two monster hotels, the
+extraordinary agrement of which (I mean of course the high pitch of mere
+monster-hotel amenity) marks for me [how] the rate at which, the way
+_in_ which, things are done over here changes and changes. When I
+remember the hotels of twenty-five years ago even! It will give me
+brilliant chapters on hotel-civilization. Alas, however, with perpetual
+movement and perpetual people and very few concrete objects of nature or
+art to make use of for assimilation, my brilliant chapters don't get
+themselves written--so little can they be notes of the current
+picturesque--like one's European notes. They can only be notes on a
+social order, of vast extent, and I see with a kind of despair that I
+shall be able to do here little more than get my saturation, soak my
+intellectual sponge--reserving the squeezing-out for the subsequent, ah,
+the so yearned-for peace of Lamb House. It's all interesting, but it
+isn't thrilling--though I gather everything is more really curious and
+vivid in the West--to which and California, and to Mexico if I can, I
+presently proceed. Cuba lies off here at but twelve hours of
+steamer--and I am heartbroken at not having time for a snuff of that
+flamboyant flower.
+
+
+_Saint Augustine, Feb. 18th._
+
+I had to break off day before yesterday, and I have completed meanwhile,
+by having come thus far north, my sad sacrifice of an intenser
+exoticism. I am stopping for two or three days at the "oldest city in
+America"--two or three being none too much to sit in wonderment at the
+success with which it has outlived its age. The paucity of the signs of
+the same has perhaps almost the pathos the signs themselves would have
+if there _were_ any. There is rather a big and melancholy and "toned"
+(with a patina) old Spanish fort (of the 16th century,) but horrible
+little modernisms surround it. On the other hand this huge modern hotel
+(Ponce de Leon) is in the style of the Alhambra, and the principal
+church ("Presbyterian") in that of the mosque of Cordova. So there are
+compensations--and a tiny old Spanish cathedral front ("earliest church
+built in America"--late 16th century,) which appeals with a yellow
+ancientry. But I must pull off--simply sticking in a memento[A] (of a
+public development, on my desperate part) which I have no time to
+explain. This refers to a past exploit, but the leap is taken, is being
+renewed; I repeat the horrid act at Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis,
+San Francisco and later on in New York--_have_ already done so at
+Philadelphia (always to "private" "literary" or Ladies' Clubs--at
+Philadelphia to a vast multitude, with Miss Repplier as brilliant
+introducer. At Bryn Mawr to 700 persons--by way of a _little_ circle.)
+In fine I have waked up _conferencier_, and find, to my stupefaction,
+that I can do it. The fee is large, of course--otherwise! Indianapolis
+offers L100 for 50 minutes! It pays in short travelling expenses, and
+the incidental circumstances and phenomena are full of illustration. I
+can't do it _often_--but for L30 a time I should easily be able to. Only
+that would be death. If I could come back here to abide I think I should
+really be able to abide in (relative) affluence: one can, on the spot,
+make so much more money--or at least I might. But I would rather live a
+beggar at Lamb House--and it's to that I shall return. Let my
+biographer, however, recall the solid sacrifice I shall have made. I
+have just read over your New Year's eve letter and it makes me so
+homesick that the bribe itself will largely seem to have been on the
+side of the reversion--the bribe to one's finest sensibility. I have
+published a novel--"The Golden Bowl"--here (in two vols.) in advance (15
+weeks ago) of the English issue--and the latter will be (I don't even
+know if it's out yet in London) in so comparatively mean and
+fine-printed a London form that I have no heart to direct a few gift
+copies to be addressed. I shall convey to you somehow the handsome New
+York page--don't read it till then. The thing has "done" much less ill
+here than anything I have ever produced.
+
+But good-night, verily--with all love to all, and to Mrs. Nelly in
+particular.
+
+/*
+Yours always,
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+ [A] Card of admission to a lecture by H. J. (The Lesson of
+ Balzac), Bryn Mawr College, Jan. 19, 1905.
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
+
+
+/*
+Hotel Ponce de Leon,
+St. Augustine, Florida.
+
+February 21st, '05.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest old Friend!
+*/
+
+I am leaving this subtropical Floridian spot from one half hour to
+another, but the horror of not having for so long despatched a word to
+you, the shame and grief and contrition of it, are so strong, within me,
+that I simply seize the passing moment by the hair of its head and glare
+at it till it pauses long enough to let me--as it were--embrace you. Yet
+I feel, have felt, all along, that you will have _understood_, and that
+words are wasted in explaining the obvious. Letters, all these weeks and
+weeks, day to day and hour to hour letters, have fluttered about me in a
+dense crowd even as the San Marco pigeons, in Venice, round him who
+appears _to_ have corn to scatter. So the whole queer time has gone in
+my scattering corn--scattering and chattering, and being chattered and
+scattered to, and moving from place to place, and surrendering to people
+(the _only_ thing to do here--since things, apart from people, are
+_nil_;) in _staying_ with them, literally, from place to place and week
+to week (though with old friends, as it were, alone--that is mostly,
+thank God--to avoid new obligations:) doing that as the only solution of
+the problem of "seeing" the country. I _am_ seeing, very well--but the
+weariness of so much of so prolonged and sustained a process is, at
+times, surpassing. It would be a strain, a weariness (kept up so,)
+_anywhere_; and it is extraordinarily tiresome, on occasions, here.
+Vastness of space and distance, of number and quantity, is the element
+in which one lives: it is a great complication alone to be dealing with
+a country that has fifty principal cities--each a law unto itself--and
+unto _you_: England, poor old dear, having (to speak of) but one. On the
+other hand it is distinctly interesting--the business and the country,
+as a whole; there are no exquisite moments (save a few of a _funniness_
+that comes to that;) but there are none from which one doesn't _get_
+something....And meanwhile I am _lecturing_ a little to pay the Piper,
+as I go--for high fees (of course) and as yet but three or four times.
+But they give me gladly L50 for 50 minutes (a pound a minute--like
+Patti!)--and always for the same lecture (as yet:) _The Lesson of
+Balzac_. I do it beautifully--feel as if I had discovered my
+vocation--at any rate amaze myself. It is _well_--for without it I don't
+see how I could have held out.
+
+...This winter has been a hideous succession of huge snow-blizzards,
+blinding polar waves, and these southernmost places, even, are not their
+usual soft selves. Yet the very south tiptoe of Florida, from which I
+came three days ago, has an air as of molten liquid velvet, and the palm
+and the orange, the pine-apple, the scarlet hibiscus, the vast magnolia
+and the sapphire sea, make it a vision of very considerable beguilement.
+I _wanted_ to put over to Cuba--but one night from this coast; but it
+was, for reasons, not to be done--reasons of time and money. I _shall_
+try for Mexico--and meanwhile pray for me hard. My visit is doing--_has_
+done--my little reputation here, save the mark, great good. _The Golden
+Bowl_ is in its _fourth_ edition--unprecedented! You see I "answer" your
+last newses and things not at all--not even the note of anxiety about T.
+Such are these cruelties, these ferocities of separation. But I drink in
+everything you tell me, and I cherish you all always and am yours and
+the children's twain ever so constantly,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edward Warren._
+
+
+/*
+University Club,
+Chicago.
+
+March 19th, 1905.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Edward,
+*/
+
+This is but a mere breathless blessing hurled at you, as it were,
+between trains and in ever so grateful joy in your brave double letter
+(of the lame hand, hero that you are!) which has just overtaken me here.
+I'm not pretending to write--I can't; it's impossible amid the movement
+and obsession and complication of all this overwhelming _muchness_ of
+space and distance and time (consumed,) and above all of people
+(consuming.) I start in a few hours straight for California--enter my
+train this, Monday, night 7.30, and reach Los Angeles and Pasadena at
+2.30 Thursday afternoon. The train has, I believe, barber's shops,
+bathrooms, stenographers and typists; so that if I can add a postscript,
+without too much joggle, I will. But you will say "_Here_ is joggle
+enough," for alack, I am already (after 17 days of the "great Middle
+West") rather spent and weary, weary of motion and chatter, and oh, of
+such an unimagined dreariness of _ugliness_ (on many, on most sides!)
+and of the perpetual effort of trying to "do justice" to what one
+doesn't like. If one could only damn it and have done with it! So much
+of it is rank with good intentions. And then the "kindness"--the
+princely (as it were) hospitality of these clubs; besides the sense of
+_power_, huge and augmenting power (vast mechanical, industrial, social,
+financial) everywhere! This Chicago is huge, _infinite_ (of potential
+size and form, and even of actual;) black, smoky, _old_-looking, very
+like some preternaturally _boomed_ Manchester or Glasgow lying beside a
+colossal lake (Michigan) of hard pale green jade, and putting forth
+railway antennae of maddening complexity and gigantic length. Yet this
+club (which looks old and sober too!) is an abode of peace, a
+benediction to me in the looming largeness; I _live_ here, and they put
+one up (always, everywhere,) with one's so excellent room with perfect
+bathroom and w.c. of its own, appurtenant (the _universal_ joy of this
+country, in private houses or wherever; a feature that is really almost
+a consolation for many things.) I have been to the south, the far end of
+Florida &c--but prefer the far end of Sussex! In the heart of golden
+orange-groves I yearned for the shade of the old L.H. mulberry tree. So
+you see I am loyal, and I sail for Liverpool on July 4th. I go up the
+whole Pacific coast to Vancouver, and return to New York (am due there
+April 26th) by the Canadian-Pacific railway (said to be, in its first
+half, sublime.) But I scribble beyond my time. Your letters are really a
+blessed breath of brave old Britain. But oh for a talk in a Westminster
+panelled parlour, or a walk on far-shining Camber sands! All love to
+Margaret and the younglings. I have again written to Jonathan--he will
+have more news of me for you. Yours, dearest Edward, almost in nostalgic
+_rage_, and at any rate in constant affection,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. William James._
+
+
+/*
+Hotel del Coronado,
+Coronado Beach, California.
+
+Wednesday night,
+April 5th, 1905.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Alice,
+*/
+
+I must write you again before I leave this place (which I do tomorrow
+noon;) if only to still a little the unrest of my having condemned
+myself, all too awkwardly, to be so long without hearing from you. I
+haven't all this while--that is these several days--had the letters
+which I am believing you will have forwarded to Monterey sent down to me
+here. This I have abstained from mainly because, having stopped over
+here these eight or nine days to write, in extreme urgency, an article,
+and wishing to finish it at any price, I have felt that I should go to
+pieces as an author if a mass of arrears of postal matter should come
+tumbling in upon me--and particularly if any of it should be troublous.
+However, I devoutly hope none of it has been troublous--and I have done
+my best to let you know (in any need of wiring etc.) where I have been.
+Also the letterless state has added itself to the deliciously simplified
+social state to make me taste the charming sweetness and comfort of this
+spot. California, on these terms, when all is said (Southern C. at
+least--which, however, the real C., I believe, much repudiates,) has
+completely bowled me over--such a delicious difference from the rest of
+the U.S. do I find in it. (I speak of course all of nature and climate,
+fruits and flowers; for there is absolutely nothing else, and the sense
+of the shining social and human inane is utter.) The days have been
+mostly here of heavenly beauty, and the flowers, the wild flowers just
+now in particular, which fairly _rage_, with radiance, over the land,
+are worthy of some purer planet than this. I live on oranges and olives,
+fresh from the tree, and I lie awake nights to listen, on purpose, to
+the languid list of the Pacific, which my windows overhang. I wish poor
+heroic Harry could be here--the thought of whose privations, while I
+wallow unworthy, makes me (tell him with all my love) miserably sick and
+poisons much of my profit. I go back to Los Angeles to-morrow, to (as I
+wrote you last) re-utter my (now loathly) Lecture to a female culture
+club of 900 members (whom I make pay me through the nose,) and on
+Saturday p.m. 8th, I shall be at Monterey (Hotel del Monte.) But my stay
+there is now condemned to bitterest brevity and my margin of time for
+all the rest of this job is so rapidly shrinking that I see myself
+_brulant mes etapes_, alas, without exception, and cutting down my
+famous visit to Seattle to a couple of days. It breaks my heart to have
+so stinted myself here--but it was inevitable, and no one had given me
+the least inkling that I should find California so sympathetic. It is
+strange and inconvenient, how little impression of anything any one ever
+takes the trouble to give one beforehand. I should like to stay here all
+April and May. But I am writing more than my time permits--my article is
+still to finish. I ask you no questions--you will have told me
+everything. I live in the hope that the news from Wm. will have been
+good. At least at Monterey, may there be some.... But good night--with
+great and distributed tenderness. Yours, dearest Alice, always and ever,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To William James._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+95 Irving Street,
+Cambridge, Mass.
+
+July 2nd, 1905.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest W.,
+*/
+
+I am ticking this out at you for reasons of convenience that will be
+even greater for yourself, I think, than for me.... Your good letter of
+farewell reached me at Lenox, from which I returned but last evening--to
+learn, however, from A., every circumstance of your departure and of
+your condition, as known up to date. The grim grey Chicago will now be
+your daily medium, but will put forth for you, I trust, every such
+flower of amenity as it is capable of growing. May you not regret, at
+any point, having gone so far to meet its queer appetites. Alice tells
+me that you are to go almost straight thence (though with a little
+interval here, as I sympathetically understand) to the Adirondacks:
+where I hope for you as big a bath of impersonal Nature as possible,
+with the tub as little tainted, that is, by the soapsuds of _personal_:
+in other words, all the "board" you need, but no boarders. I seem
+greatly to mislike, not to say deeply to mistrust, the Adirondack
+boarder....I greatly enjoyed the whole Lenox countryside, seeing it as
+I did by the aid of the Whartons' big strong commodious new motor, which
+has fairly converted me to the sense of all the thing may do for one and
+one may get from it. The potent way it deals with a country large enough
+for it not to _rudoyer_, but to rope in, in big free hauls, a huge
+netful of impressions at once--this came home to me beautifully,
+convincing me that if I were rich I shouldn't hesitate to take up with
+it. A great transformer of life and of the future! All that country
+charmed me; we spent the night at Ashfield and motored back the next
+day, after a morning there, by an easy circuit of 80 miles between
+luncheon and a late dinner; a circuit easily and comfortably prolonged
+for the sake of good roads....But I mustn't rattle on. I have still
+innumerable last things to do. But the portents are all
+propitious--_absit_ any ill consequence of this fatuity! I am living, at
+Alice's instance, mainly on huge watermelon, dug out in spadefuls, yet
+light to carry. But good bye now. Your last hints for the "Speech" are
+much to the point, and I will try even thus late to stick them in. May
+every comfort attend you!
+
+/*
+Ever yours,
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Margaret James._
+
+/#
+ The project of a book on London was never carried further, though
+ certain pages of the autobiographical fragment, _The Middle Years_,
+ written in 1914-15, no doubt shew the kind of line it would have
+ taken.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+November 3rd, 1905.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Peg,
+*/
+
+...In writing to your father (which, however, I shall not be able to do
+by this same post) I will tell him a little better what has been
+happening to me and why I have been so unsociable. This unsociability is
+in truth all that has been happening--as it has been the reverse of the
+medal, so to speak, of the great arrears and urgent applications (to
+work) that awaited me here after I parted with you. I have been working
+in one way and another with great assiduity, squeezing out my American
+Book with all desirable deliberation, and yet in a kind of panting dread
+of the matter of it all melting and fading from me before I have worked
+it off. It does melt and fade, over here, in the strangest way--and yet
+I did, I think, while with you, so successfully cultivate the impression
+and the saturation that even my bare residuum won't be quite a vain
+thing. I really find in fact that I have more impressions than I know
+what to do with; so that, evidently, at the rate I am going, I shall
+have pegged out two distinct volumes instead of one. I have already
+produced almost the substance of one--which I have been sending to
+"Harper" and the N.A.R., as per contract; though publication doesn't
+begin, apparently, in those periodicals till next month. And then
+(please mention to your Dad) all the time I haven't been doing the
+American Book, I have been revising with extreme minuteness three or
+four of my early works for the Edition Definitive (the settlement of
+some of the details of which seems to be hanging fire a little between
+my "agent" and my New York publishers; not, however, in a manner to
+indicate, I think, a real hitch.) Please, however, say nothing whatever,
+any of you to any one, about the existence of any such plan. These
+things should be spoken of only when they are in full feather. That for
+your Dad--I mean the information as well as the warning, in particular;
+on whom, you see, I am shamelessly working off, after all, a good deal
+of my letter. Mention to him also that still other tracts of my time,
+these last silent weeks, have gone, have _had_ to go, toward preparing
+for a job that I think I mentioned to him while with you--my pledge,
+already a couple of years old to do a romantical-psychological-pictorial
+"social" _London_ (of the general form, length, pitch, and "type" of
+Marion Crawford's _Ave Roma Immortalis_) for the Macmillans; and I have
+been feeling so nervous of late about the way America has crowded me off
+it, that I have had, for assuagement of my nerves, to begin, with piety
+and prayer, some of the very considerable reading the task will require
+of me. All this to show you that I haven't been wantonly
+uncommunicative. But good-night, dear Peg; I am going to do another for
+Aleck. With copious embraces,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To H. G. Wells._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+November 19th, 1905.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Wells,
+*/
+
+If I take up time and space with telling you why I have not _sooner_
+written to thank you for your magnificent bounty, I shall have,
+properly, to steal it from my letter, my letter itself; a much more
+important matter. And yet I _must_ say, in three words, that my course
+has been inevitable and natural. I found your first munificence here on
+returning from upwards of 11 months in America, toward the end of
+July--returning to the mountain of arrears produced by almost a year's
+absence and (superficially, thereby) a year's idleness. I recognized,
+even from afar (I had already done so) that the Utopia was a book I
+should desire to read only in the right conditions of _coming_ to it,
+coming with luxurious freedom of mind, rapt surrender of attention,
+adequate honours, for it of every sort. So, not bolting it like the
+morning paper and sundry, many, other vulgarly importunate things, and
+knowing, moreover, I had already shown you that though I was slow I was
+safe, and even certain, I "came to it" only a short time since, and
+surrendered myself to it absolutely. And it was while I was at the
+bottom of the crystal well that Kipps suddenly appeared, thrusting his
+honest and inimitable head over the edge and calling down to me, with
+his note of wondrous truth, that he had business with me above. I took
+my time, however, there below (though "below" be a most improper figure
+for your sublime and vertiginous heights,) and achieved a complete
+saturation; after which, reascending and making out things again, little
+by little, in the dingy air of the actual, I found Kipps, in his place,
+awaiting me--and from his so different but still so utterly coercive
+embrace I have just emerged. It was really very well he was there, for I
+found (and it's even a little strange) that I could read _you_
+only--_after you_--and don't at all see whom else I could have read. But
+now that this is so I don't see either, my dear Wells, how I can "write"
+you about these things--they make me want so infernally to talk with
+you, to see you at length. Let me tell you, however, simply, that they
+have left me prostrate with admiration, and that you are, for me, more
+than ever, the most interesting "literary man" of your generation--in
+fact, the only interesting one. These things do you, to my sense, the
+highest honour, and I am lost in amazement at the diversity of your
+genius. As in everything you do (and especially in these three last
+Social imaginations), it is the quality of your intellect that primarily
+(in the Utopia) obsesses me and reduces me--to that degree that even the
+colossal dimensions of your Cheek (pardon the term that I don't in the
+least invidiously apply) fails to break the spell. Indeed your Cheek is
+positively the very sign and stamp of your genius, valuable to-day, as
+you possess it, beyond any other instrument or vehicle, so that when I
+say it doesn't break the charm, I probably mean that it largely
+constitutes it, or constitutes the force: which is the force of an irony
+that no one else among us begins to have--so that we are starving, in
+our enormities and fatuities, for a sacred satirist (the satirist _with_
+irony--as poor dear old Thackeray was the satirist without it,) and you
+come, admirably, to save us. There are too many things to say--which is
+so exactly why I can't write. Cheeky, cheeky, cheeky is _any_
+young-man-at-Sandgate's offered Plan for the life of Man--but so far
+from thinking that a disqualification of your book, I think it is
+positively what makes the performance heroic. I hold, with you, that it
+is only by our each contributing Utopias (the cheekier the better) that
+anything will come, and I think there is nothing in the book truer and
+happier than your speaking of this struggle of the rare yearning
+individual toward that suggestion as one of the certain assistances of
+the future. Meantime you set a magnificent example--of _caring_, of
+feeling, of seeing, above all, and of suffering from, and with, the
+shockingly sick actuality of things. Your epilogue tag in italics
+strikes me as of the highest, of an irresistible and touching beauty.
+Bravo, bravo, my dear Wells!
+
+And now, coming to Kipps, what am I to say about Kipps but that I am
+ready, that I am compelled, utterly to _drivel_ about him? He is not so
+much a masterpiece as a mere born gem--you having, I know not how, taken
+a header straight down into mysterious depths of observation and
+knowledge, I know not which and where, and come up again with this
+rounded pearl of the diver. But of course you know yourself how
+immitigably the thing is done--it is of such a brilliancy of _true_
+truth. I really think that you have done, at this time of day, two
+particular things for the first time of their doing among us. (1) You
+have written the first closely and intimately, the first intelligently
+and consistently ironic or satiric novel. In everything else there has
+always been the sentimental or conventional interference, the
+interference of which Thackeray is full. (2) You have for the very first
+time treated the English "lower middle" class, etc., without the
+picturesque, the grotesque, the fantastic and romantic interference of
+which Dickens, e.g., is so misleadingly, of which even George Eliot is
+so deviatingly, full. You have handled its vulgarity in so scientific
+and historic a spirit, and seen the whole thing all in its _own_ strong
+light. And then the book has throughout such extraordinary life;
+everyone in it, without exception, and every piece and part of it, is so
+vivid and sharp and _raw_. Kipps himself is a diamond of the first
+water, from start to finish, exquisite and radiant; Coote is consummate,
+Chitterlow magnificent (the whole first evening with Chitterlow perhaps
+the most brilliant thing in the book--unless that glory be reserved for
+the way the entire matter of the _shop_ is done, including the admirable
+image of the boss.) It all in fine, from cover to cover, does you the
+greatest honour, and if we had any other than skin-deep criticism (very
+stupid, too, at that,) it would have immense recognition.
+
+I repeat that these things have made me want greatly to see you. Is it
+thinkable to you that you might come over at this ungenial season, for a
+night--some time before Xmas? Could you, would you? I should immensely
+rejoice in it. I am here till Jan. 31st--when I go up to London for
+three months. I go away, probably, for four or five days at Xmas--and I
+go away for next Saturday-Tuesday. But apart from those dates I would
+await you with rapture.
+
+And let me say just one word of attenuation of my (only apparent)
+meanness over the _Golden Bowl_. I was in America when that work
+appeared, and it was published there in 2 vols. and in very charming and
+readable form, each vol. but moderately thick and with a legible,
+handsome, large-typed page. But there came over to me a copy of the
+London issue, fat, vile, small-typed, horrific, prohibitive, that so
+broke my heart that I vowed I wouldn't, for very shame, disseminate it,
+and I haven't, with that feeling, had a copy in the house or sent one to
+a single friend. I wish I had an American one at your disposition--but I
+have been again and again depleted of all ownership in respect to it.
+You are very welcome to the British brick if you, at this late day, will
+have it.
+
+I greet Mrs Wells and the Third Party very cordially and am yours, my
+dear Wells, more than ever,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To William James._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+November 23rd, 1905.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest William,
+*/
+
+I wrote not many days since to Aleck, and not very, very many before to
+Peggy--but I can't, to-night, hideously further postpone acknowledging
+your so liberal letter of Oct. 22nd (the one in which you enclosed me
+Aleck's sweet one,) albeit I have been in the house all day without an
+outing, and very continuously writing, and it is now 11 p.m. and I am
+rather fagged.... However, I shall write to Alice for information--all
+the more that I deeply owe that dear eternal Heroine a letter. I am not
+"satisfied about her," please tell her with my tender love, and should
+have testified to this otherwise than by my long cold silence if only I
+hadn't been, for stress of composition, putting myself on very limited
+contribution to the post. The worst of these bad manners are now over,
+and please tell Alice that my very next letter shall be to her. Only
+_she_ mustn't put pen to paper for me, not so much as dream of it,
+before she hears from me. I take a deep and rich and brooding comfort in
+the thought of how splendidly you are all "turning out" all the
+while--especially Harry and Bill, and especially Peg, and above all,
+Aleck--in addition to Alice and you. I turn you over (in my spiritual
+pocket,) collectively and individually, and make you chink and rattle
+and ring; getting from you the sense of a great, though too-much (for my
+use) tied-up fortune. I have great joy (tell him with my love) of the
+news of Bill's so superior work, and yearn to have some sort of a squint
+at it. Tell him, at any rate, how I await him, for his holidays, out
+here--on this spot--and I wish I realized more richly Harry's present
+conditions. I await him here not less.
+
+I mean (in response to what you write me of your having read the _Golden
+B._) to try to produce some uncanny form of thing, in fiction, that will
+gratify you, as Brother--but let me say, dear William, that I shall
+greatly be humiliated if you _do_ like it, and thereby lump it, in your
+affection, with things, of the current age, that I have heard you
+express admiration for and that I would sooner descend to a dishonoured
+grave than have written. Still I _will_ write you your book, on that
+two-and-two-make-four system on which all the awful truck that surrounds
+us is produced, and _then_ descend to my dishonoured grave--taking up
+the art of the slate pencil instead of, longer, the art of the brush
+(vide my lecture on Balzac.) But it is, seriously, too late at night,
+and I am too tired, for me to express myself on this question--beyond
+saying that I'm always sorry when I hear of your reading anything of
+mine, and always hope you won't--you seem to me so constitutionally
+unable to "enjoy" it, and so condemned to look at it from a point of
+view remotely alien to mine in writing it, and to the conditions out of
+which, _as_ mine, it has inevitably sprung--so that all the intentions
+that have been its main reason for being (with _me_) appear never to
+have reached you at all--and you appear even to assume that the life,
+the elements forming its subject-matter, deviate from felicity in not
+having an impossible analogy with the life of Cambridge. I see nowhere
+about me done or dreamed of the things that alone for me constitute the
+_interest_ of the doing of the novel--and yet it is in a sacrifice of
+them on their very own ground that the thing you suggest to me evidently
+consists. It shows how far apart and to what different ends we have had
+to work out (very naturally and properly!) our respective intellectual
+lives. And yet I can read _you_ with rapture--having three weeks ago
+spent three or four days with Manton Marble at Brighton and found in his
+hands ever so many of your recent papers and discourses, which, having
+margin of mornings in my room, through both breakfasting and lunching
+there (by the habit of the house,) I found time to read several of--with
+the effect of asking you, earnestly, to address me some of those that I
+so often, in Irving St., saw you address to others who were not your
+brother. I had no time to read them there. Philosophically, in short, I
+am "with" you, almost completely, and you ought to take account of this
+and get me over altogether.--There are two books by the way (one
+fictive) that I permit you to _raffoler_ about as much as you like, for
+I have been doing so myself--H. G. Wells's _Utopia_ and his _Kipps_. The
+_Utopia_ seems to me even more remarkable for other things than for his
+characteristic cheek, and _Kipps_ is quite magnificent. Read them both
+if you haven't--certainly read Kipps.--There's also another subject I'm
+too full of not to mention the good thing I've done for myself--that is,
+for Lamb House and my garden--by moving the greenhouse away from the
+high old wall near the house (into the back garden, setting it up
+better--against the _street_ wall) and thereby throwing the liberated
+space into the front garden to its immense apparent extension and
+beautification....
+
+/*
+But oh, fondly, good-night!
+
+Ever your
+HENRY.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To W. E. Norris._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+December 23rd, 1905.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Norris,
+*/
+
+It is my desire that this, which I shall post here to-morrow, shall be a
+tiny item in the hecatomb of friendship gracing your breakfast table on
+Christmas morning and mingling the smoke of (certain) aged and infirm
+victims with the finer and fresher fumes of the board. But the aged and
+infirm propose and the postman disposes and I can only hope I shall not
+be either disconcertingly previous or ineffectively subsequent. If my
+mind's eye loses you at sweet (yet sublime) Underbank, I still see you
+in a Devonshire mild light and feel your Torquay window letting in your
+Torquay air--which, at this distance, in this sadly Southeasternized
+corner, suggests all sorts of enviable balm and beatitude. It was a real
+pang to me, some weeks ago, when you were coming up to town, to have to
+put behind me, with so ungracious and uncompromising a gesture, the
+question, and the great temptation, of being there for a little at the
+same moment. But there are hours and seasons--and I know the face of
+them well--when my need to mind my business here, and to mind nothing
+else, becomes absolute--London tending rather over-much, moreover, to
+set frequent and freshly-baited traps, at all times, for a still too
+susceptible and guileless old country mouse. All my consciousness
+centres, necessarily, just now, on a single small problem, that of
+managing to do an "American book" (or rather a couple of them,) that I
+had supposed myself, in advance, capable of doing on the spot, but that
+I had there, in fact, utterly to forswear--time, energy, opportunity to
+write, every possibility quite failing me--with the consequence of my
+material, my "documents" over here, quite failing me too and there being
+nothing left for me but to run a race with an illusion, the illusion of
+still _seeing_ it, which is, as it recedes, so to speak, a thousand
+lengths ahead of me. I shall keep it up as a tour de force, and produce
+my copy somehow (I have indeed practically done one vol. of
+"Impressions"--there are to be two, separate and differently-titled;)
+but I am unable, meanwhile, to dally by the way--the sweet wayside of
+Pall Mall--or to turn either to the right or the left. (My
+subject--unless I grip it tight--melts away--Rye, Sussex, is so little
+like it; and then where am I? And yet the thing interests me to do,
+though at the same time appalling me by its difficulty. But I didn't
+mean to tell you this long story about it.) I hope you are plashing
+yourself in more pellucid waters--and I find I _assume_ that there is in
+every way a great increase of the pellucid in your case by the fact of
+the neighbouring presence of your (as I again, and I trust not
+fallaciously assume) sympathetic collaterals. I should greatly like,
+here, a collateral or two myself--to find the advantage, across the sea,
+of the handful of those of mine who _are_ sympathetic, makes me miss
+them, or the possibility of them, in this country of my adoption, which
+is more than kind, but less than kin.... I spend the month of January,
+further, in this place--then I do seek the metropolis for 12 or 14
+weeks. I expect to hear from you that you have carried off some cup or
+other (sculling for preference) in your Bank Holiday Sports--so for
+heaven's sake don't disappoint me. You're my one link with the Athletic
+world, and I like to be able to talk about you. Therefore, apropos of
+cups, all power to your elbow! I know none now--no cup--but the
+uninspiring cocoa--which I carry with a more and more doddering hand.
+But I am still, my dear Norris, very lustily and constantly yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Paul Harvey._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+March 11, 1906.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Paul,
+*/
+
+...It is delightful to me, please believe, not wholly to lose touch of
+you--ghostly and ineffective indeed as that touch seems destined to feel
+itself. I find myself almost wishing that the whirligig of time had
+brought round the day of your inscription with many honours on some
+comfortable "retired list" which might keep you a little less on the dim
+confines of the Empire, and make you thereby more accessible and
+conversible. Only I reflect that by the time the grey purgatory of South
+Kensington, or wherever, crowns and pensions your bright career, I,
+alas, shall have been whirled away to a sphere compared to which
+Salonica and even furthest Ind are easy and familiar resorts, with no
+crown at all, most probably--not even "heavenly," and no communication
+with you save by table-raps and telepathists (like a really startling
+communication I have just had from--or through--a "Medium" in America
+(near Boston,) a message purporting to come from my Mother, who died 25
+years ago and from whom it ostensibly proceeded during a seance at which
+my sister-in-law, with two or three other persons, was present. The
+point is that the message is an allusion to a matter known (so personal
+is it to myself) to no other individual in the world but _me_--not
+_possibly_ either to the medium or to my sister-in-law; and an allusion
+so pertinent and _initiated_ and tender and helpful, and yet so unhelped
+by any actual earthly knowledge on any one's part, that it quite
+astounds as well as deeply touches me. If the subject of the message had
+been conceivably in my sister-in-law's mind it would have been an
+interesting but not infrequent case of telepathy; but, as I say, it
+couldn't thinkably have been, and she only transmits it to me, after the
+fact, not even fully understanding it. So, I repeat, I am
+astounded!--and almost equally astounded at my having drifted into this
+importunate mention of it to you! But the letter retailing it arrived
+only this a.m. and I have been rather full of it.)--I had heard of your
+present whereabouts from Edward Childe ... and I give you my word of
+honour that my great thought was, already before your own good words had
+come, to attest to you, on my own side, and pen in hand, my
+inextinguishable interest in you. I came back from the U.S. after an
+absence of nearly a year (11 months) by last midsummer, whereupon my joy
+at returning to this so little American nook took the form of my having
+stuck here fast (with great arrears of sedentary occupation &c.) till
+almost the other day ... I found my native land, after so many years,
+interesting, formidable, fearsome and fatiguing, and much more difficult
+to see and deal with in any extended and various way than I had
+supposed. I was able to do with it far less than I had hoped, in the way
+of visitation--I found many of the conditions too deterrent; but I did
+what I could, went to the far South, the Middle West, California, the
+whole Pacific coast &c., and spent some time in the Eastern cities. It
+is an extraordinary world, an altogether huge "proposition," as they say
+there, giving one, I think, an immense impression of material and
+political power; but almost cruelly charmless, in effect, and calculated
+to make one crouch, ever afterwards, as cravenly as possible, at Lamb
+House, Rye--if one happens to have a poor little L.H., R., to crouch
+in. This I am accordingly doing very hard--with intervals of London
+inserted a good deal at this Season--I go up again, in a few days, to
+stay till about May. So I am not making history, my dear Paul, as you
+are; I am at least only making my very limited and intimate own. Vous
+avez beau dire, you, and Mrs Paul, and Miss Paul, are making that of
+Europe--though you don't appear to realize it any more than M. Jourdain
+did that he was talking prose. Have patience, meanwhile--you will have
+plenty of South Kensington later on (among other retired pro-consuls and
+where Miss Paul will "come out";) and meanwhile you are, from the L.H.
+point of view, a family of thrilling Romance. And it _must_ be
+interesting to ameliorer le sort des populations--and to see real live
+Turbaned Turks going about you, and above all to have, even in the sea,
+a house from which you look at divine Olympus. You live with the gods,
+if not like them--and out of all this unutterable Anglo-Saxon
+banality--so extra-banalized by the extinction of dear Arthur Balfour. I
+take great joy in the prospect of really getting hold of you, all three,
+next summer. I count, fondly, on your presence here and I send the very
+kindest greeting and blessing to your two companions. The elder is of
+course still very young, but how old the younger must now be!
+
+...Yours, my dear Paul, always and ever,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To William James._
+
+/#
+ Professor and Mrs. William James had been in California at this
+ time of the great San Francisco earthquake and conflagration. They
+ fortunately escaped uninjured, but for some days H. J. had been in
+ deep anxiety, not knowing their exact whereabouts.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
+
+May 4th, 1906.
+*/
+
+/*
+Beloved Ones!
+*/
+
+I wrote you, feverishly, last Saturday, but now comes in a blest cable
+from Harry telling of your being as far on your way home as at Denver
+and communicating thence in inspired accents and form, and this, for
+which I have been yearning (the news of your having to that extent
+shaken off the dust of your ruin), fills me with such joy that I scrawl
+you these still agitated words of jubilation--though I can't seem to you
+less than incoherent and beside the mark, I fear, till I have got your
+letter from Stanford which Harry has already announced his expedition of
+on the 28th. (This must come in a day or two more.) Meanwhile there was
+three days ago an excellent letter in the _Times_ from Stanford itself
+(or P.A.) enabling me, for the first time, to conceive a little, and a
+trifle less luridly to imagine, the facts of your case. I had at first
+believed those facts to be that you were thrown bedless and roofless
+upon the world, semi-clad and semi-starving, and with all that class of
+phenomena about you. But how do I know, after all, even yet? and I await
+your light with an anxiety that still endures. I have just parted with
+Bill, who dined with me, and who is to lunch with me tomorrow--(I going
+in the evening to the "Academy Dinner.") I have, since the arrival of
+Harry's telegram, or cable of reassurance--the second to that effect,
+not this of to-day, which makes the third and best--I have been, as I
+say, trying, under pressure, a three days' motor trip with the Whartons,
+much frustrated by bad weather and from which I impatiently and
+prematurely and gleefully returned to-day: so that I have been separated
+from B. for 48 hours. But I tell you of him rather than talk to you, in
+the air, of your own weird experiences. He is to go on to Paris on the
+6th, having waited over here to go to the Private View of the Academy,
+to see me again, and to make use of Sunday 6th (a _dies non_ in Paris as
+here) for his journey. It has been delightful to me to have him near me,
+and he has spent and re-spent long hours at the National Gallery, from
+which he derives (as also from the Wallace Collection) great stimulus
+and profit. I am extremely struck with his _seriousness_ of spirit and
+intention--he seems to me _all_ in the thing he wants to do (and awfully
+intelligent about it;) so that in fine he seems to me to bring to his
+design quite an exceptional quality and kind of intensity.... What a
+family--with the gallantries of the pair of _you_ thrown in! Well, you,
+beloved Alice, have needed so exceedingly a "change," and I was
+preaching to you that you should arrive at one somehow or
+perish--whereby you have had it with a vengeance, and I hope the effects
+will be appreciable (that is not altogether accurst) to you. What I
+really now _most_ feel the pang and the woe of is my not being there to
+hang upon the lips of your conjoined eloquence. I really think I must go
+over to you again for a month--just to listen to you. But I wait and am
+ever more and more fondly your
+
+/*
+HENRY.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To William James._
+
+
+/*
+The Athenaeum, Pall Mall, S.W.
+
+May 11th, 1906.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest William,
+*/
+
+To-day at last reach me (an hour ago) your blest letter to myself of
+April 19th and Alice's not less sublime one (or a type-copy of the
+same,) addressed to Irving St. and forwarded by dear Peg, to whom all
+thanks ... I have written to Harry a good deal from the first, and to
+your dear selves last week, and you will know how wide open the mouth of
+my desire stands to learn from you everything and anything you can chuck
+into it. Most vivid and pathetic these so surprisingly lucid pictures
+dashed down--or rather so calmly committed to paper--by both of you in
+the very midst of the crash, and what a hell of a time you must have had
+altogether. What a noble act your taking your Miss Martin to the blazing
+and bursting San Francisco--and what a devil of a day of anxiety it must
+have given to the sublime Alice. Dearest sublime Alice, your details of
+feeding the hungry and sleeping in the backyard bring tears to my eyes.
+I hope all the later experience didn't turn to _worse_ dreariness and
+weariness--it was probably kept human and "vivid" by the whole
+associated elements of drama. Yet how differently I read it all from
+knowing you now restored to your liberal home and lovely brood--where I
+hope you are guest-receiving and housekeeping as little as possible. How
+your mother must have folded you in! I kept thinking of her, for days,
+please tell her, almost more than of you! It's hideous to want to
+condemn you to _write_ on top of everything else--yet I sneakingly hope
+for more, though indeed it wouldn't take much to make me sail straight
+home--just to talk with you for a week.
+
+...I return to Rye on the 16th with rapture--after too long a tangle of
+delays here. However, it is no more than the right moment for adequate
+charm of season, drop (unberufen!) of east wind etc.--But why do I talk
+of these trifles when what I am after all really full of is the hope
+that they have been crowning you both with laurels and smothering you
+with flowers at Cambridge. Also, greedily (for you), with the hope that
+you didn't come away _minus_ any lecture-money due to you....
+
+But good-bye for now--with ever so tender love.
+
+/*
+Ever your HENRY.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Margaret James._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+November 8th, 1906.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Peggot,
+*/
+
+I have had before me but an hour or two your delightful, though somewhat
+agitating letter of October 29th, and I am so touched by your faithful
+memory of your poor fond old Uncle, and by your snatching an hour to
+devote to him, even as a brand from the burning, that I scribble you
+this joyous acknowledgment before I go to bed. I have been immensely
+interested in your whole Collegiate adventure--fragments of the history
+of which, so far as you've got, I've had from your mother--and all the
+more interested that, by a blest good fortune, I happen to _know_ your
+scholastic shades and so am able, in imagination, to cling to you and
+follow you round. I seem to make out that you are very physically
+comfortable, all round, and I have indeed a very charming image of Bryn
+Mawr, though I dare say these months adorn it less than my June-time. I
+yearn tenderly over your home-sickness--and fear I don't help you with
+it when I tell you how well I understand it as, at first, your
+inevitable portion. To exchange the realm of talk and taste of Irving
+St. and the privileges and luxury of your Dad's and your Mother's
+company and genius for the common doings and sayings, the common air and
+effluence of other American homes, represents a sorry drop--which can
+only be softened for you by the diversion of seeking out what charms of
+sorts these other homes may have had that Irving St. lacks. You may not
+find any, to speak of, but meanwhile you will have wandered away and in
+so doing will have left the bloom of your nostalgia behind. It doesn't
+remain acute, but there will be always enough for you to go home with
+again. And you will make your little sphere of relations--which will
+give out an interest of their own; and see a lot of life and realise a
+lot of types, not to speak of all the enriching of your mind and
+augmentation of your power. Your poor old uncle groans with shame when
+he bethinks himself of the scant and miserable education, and educative
+opportunity, _he_ had [compared with] his magnificent modern niece. No
+one took any interest whatever in _his_ development, except to neglect
+or snub it where it might have helped--and any that he was ever to have
+he picked up wholly by himself. But that is very ancient history
+now--and he is very glad to have picked up Lamb House, where he sits
+writing you this of a wet November night and communes, so far as
+possible, on the spot, with the ghost of the little niece who came down
+from Harrow to spend her holidays in so dull and patient and
+Waverley-novelly a fashion with him.... I rejoice greatly in your sweet
+companion--I mean in the sweetness of her as chum and comrade, _for_
+you, and I send, I hope not presumptuously, a slice of your Uncle's
+blessing. Also is it uplifting to hear that you find Miss Carey Thomas
+benevolent and inspiring--she struck me as a very able and accomplished
+and intelligent lady, and I should like to send her through you, if you
+have a chance, my very faithful remembrance and to thank her very kindly
+for her appreciation of my niece. But I hope she doesn't, or won't, work
+you to the bone! Goodnight, dear Child.
+
+/*
+Your fond old Uncle.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Dew-Smith._
+
+/#
+ This refers to the revision of _Roderick Hudson_, which was to head
+ the "New York" edition of his novels, now definitely announced.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+November 12th, 1906.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Mrs. Dew-Smith,
+*/
+
+Very kind your note about the apples and about poor R.H.! Burgess Noakes
+is to climb the hill in a day or two, basket on arm, and bring me back
+the rosy crop, which I am finding quite the staff of life.
+
+As for the tidied-up book, I am greatly touched by your generous
+interest in the question of the tidying-up, and yet really think your
+view of that process erratic and--quite of course--my own view well
+inspired! But we are really both right, for to attempt to retouch the
+_substance_ of the thing would be as foolish as it would be (in a _done_
+and impenetrable structure) impracticable. What I have tried for is a
+mere revision of surface and expression, as the thing is positively in
+many places quite _vilely_ written! The essence of the matter is wholly
+unaltered--save for seeming in places, I think, a little better brought
+out. At any rate the deed is already perpetrated--and I do continue to
+wish perversely and sorely that you had waited--to re-peruse--for this
+prettier and cleaner form. However, I ought only to be devoutly
+grateful--as in fact I am--for your power to re-peruse at all, and will
+come and thank you afresh as soon as you return to the fold; as to which
+I beg you to make an early signal to yours most truly,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+/#
+ The desired visit to George Sand's Nohant was brought off in the
+ following year, when H. J. motored there with Mrs. Wharton. "Rue
+ Barbet de Jouy" is the address in Paris of M. Paul Bourget.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
+
+November 17th, 1906.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Mrs. Wharton,
+*/
+
+I had from you a shortish time since a very beautiful and interesting
+letter--into the ink to thank you for which my pen has been perpetually
+about to dip, and now comes the further thrill of your "quaint" little
+picture card with its news of the Paris winter and the romantic rue de
+Varenne; on which the pen straightway plunges into the fluid. This is
+really charming and uplifting news, and I applaud the free sweep of your
+"line of life" with all my heart. We shall be almost neighbours, and I
+will most assuredly hie me as promptly as possible across the scant
+interspace of the Channel, the Pas-de-Calais &c: where the very first
+question on which I shall beset you will be your adventure and
+impression of Nohant--as to which I burn and yearn for fond particulars.
+Perhaps if you have the proper Vehicle of Passion--as I make no
+doubt--you will be going there once more--in which case _do_ take me!
+And such a suave and convenient crossing as I meanwhile wish you--and
+such a provision of philosophy laid up, in advance, for use in, and
+about, rue Barbet de Jouy! You will have finished your new fiction, I
+"presume"--if it isn't presumptuous--before embarking? and I do so for
+the right of the desire to congratulate, in that case, and envy and
+sympathise--being in all sorts of _embarras_ now, myself, over the
+finish of many things. I pant for the start of that work and languish to
+take it up. I think I have had no chance to tell you how much I admired
+your single story in the Aug. _Scribner_--beautifully done, I thought,
+and full of felicities and achieved values and pictures. All the same,
+with the rue de Varenne &c., don't go in too much for the French or the
+"Franco-American" subject--the real field of your extension is
+_here_--it has far more fusability with _our_ native and primary
+material; between which and French elements there is, I hold, a
+disparity as complete as between a life led in trees, say, and a life
+led in--sea-depths, or in other words between that of climbers and
+swimmers--or (crudely) that of monkeys and fish. Is the Play Thing
+meanwhile climbing or swimming?--I take much interest in its fate. But
+you will tell me of these things--in February! It will be _then_ I shall
+scramble over. I go home an hour or two hence (to stay as still as
+possible) after a night--only--spent in town. The perpetual summonses
+and solicitations of London (some of which _have_ to be met) are at
+times a maddening worry--or almost. I am wondering if you are not
+feeling just now perhaps a good deal, at Lenox, in the apparently
+delightful old 1840 way--a good snowstorm ending, and the Westinghouse
+colouring, as I suppose, a good deal blurred. But how I want to have it
+all--the gossip of the countryside--from you! Some of it has come to me
+as rather dreadful ... and that is what some of the lone houses in the
+deep valleys we motored through used to make me think of!...
+
+/*
+I am meanwhile yours very constantly,
+
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To W. E. Norris_
+
+
+/*
+16 Lewes Crescent,
+Brighton.
+
+December 23rd, 1906.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Norris,
+*/
+
+I think it was from here I wrote you last Christmas; by which I devoutly
+hope I don't give you a handle for saying: "And not from anywhere since
+then." But I am but too aware that it has been at the best a hideous
+record of silence and apparent gloom, and also fully feel that after
+such base _laideurs_ of behaviour explanations, attenuations,
+protestations, are as the mere rustle of the wind and had really better
+be left unuttered. That only adds to the dark burden of one's
+consciousness when one does write; one crawls into the dear outraged
+presence with all one's imperfections on one's head. So I'll indulge, at
+any rate, in no specific plea--but only in that general one of the fact
+that the letter-writing faculty within me has become extinct through
+increasing age, infirmity, embarrassment (the spelling faculty, even,
+you see, _almost_ extinct,) and general demoralization and desolation.
+Twenty reproachful spectres rise up before me--out of whom your fine sad
+face is only the most awful. All I can say for myself (and _you_) is
+that among these feeble reparations that I am trying to make in the way
+of "hardy annuals"--hardy in the sense, I fear, of a sort of shameful
+brazenness--this "Christmas letter" to you takes absolute precedence. I
+wrote indeed to Rhoda Broughton a couple of days since, from town, but
+that was a melancholy matter on the occasion of my having gone up to
+poor dear Hamilton Aide's memorial service (where I didn't see her,
+though she may have been present, and of which I thought she would care
+for some little account. It was a very beautiful and touching musical
+service. But I haven't seen _her_ for a long time, alas!--amid these
+years of more and more interspaced--and finished--occasions.) Of course
+I am hoping that this will lie on your table on Xmas morning--in all
+sorts of charming company, and not before and not after. But it's
+difficult to time communications at this upheaved season, especially
+from another (non-London) province, and I trust to the happy hazard,
+though still a little ruffled by a sense of the break-down of things
+(the "public services") that compelled me yesterday, coming down here
+from Victoria, to be shoved into (as the only place in the train) the
+small connecting-space between two Pullmans, where I stuck, all the way,
+in a tight bunch of five or six other men and three portmanteaux and
+boxes: quite the sort of treatment (one's nose half in the w.c.
+included) that the English traveller writes from Italy infuriated
+letters to the _Times_ about. I figure you at all events exempt from any
+indignity of movement (and the conditions of movement nowadays almost
+all include indignity) and still sitting up on your Torquay slope as on
+a mild Olympus and with this strife of circulating humans far below you.
+But when I reflect that I don't _know_, for certain, any of your
+actualities I reflect with a crimson countenance on the months that have
+elapsed. I have before me as I write a beautiful letter from you, of the
+date of which nothing would induce me to remind you--but that is not
+quite your contemporary history.... Putting your own news at its
+quietest, however, my own runs it close--for save for this small
+episode (a stay with some old and intensely tranquil American friends
+established here for the ending of _their_ days,) and putting aside a
+few days at a time in London, which I find periodically inevitable, and
+even quite like, I haven't stirred for ages from my own house, the
+suitability of which to my modest scheme of existence grows fortunately
+more and more marked. I spent last summer there--the most beautiful of
+one's life I think--without the briefest of breaks--and that gregarious
+time is the one at which I like least to circulate. The little place,
+alas, becomes itself--like all places save Torquay, I judge--more and
+more gregarious: and there were a good many days when even my own small
+premises bristled too much with the invader. But there is a great virtue
+in sitting tight--you sit out many things; even bores are, comparatively
+speaking, loose; and I had a blest sort of garden (by which I'm far from
+meaning gardening) summer. What it must have been beside your sapphire
+sea! I return, at any rate, in a few days, to sit tight again, till
+early in February, when there are reasons for my probably going for five
+or six weeks to Paris; and even possibly--or impossibly--to Rome; one of
+the principal of these being that the prospect fills me with a blackness
+of horror that I find really alarming as a sign of moral paralysis and
+abjection; so that I ought to try to fly in the face of it. But I shall
+fly at the best, I fear, very low!...
+
+I needn't tell you how much I hope and pray that this may find you, as
+they say, in health. There's an icy blast here to-day--yet I take for
+granted that if it weren't Sunday you would be doing something very
+prodigious and muscular in the teeth of it. The prize (of long activity
+and sweet survival) is with those whose hardness is greater than other
+hardnesses. And yours is greater than that of the sea-wave and all the
+rest of opposing nature--though I make this imputation only on behalf
+of your sporting resources. I appeal to the softest corner of the
+softest part of the rest of you to make before too long some magnanimous
+sign to yours very constantly,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._
+
+/#
+ Mr. Perry, whose recollections of H. J. and his brothers at Newport
+ have been read on an early page of these volumes, was at this time
+ living in Paris.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Brighton.
+
+Boxing Day, 1906.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Thomas,
+*/
+
+I have remained silent--in the matter of your last good letter--under a
+great stress of correspondence _de fin d'annee_; which you on your side
+must be having also to reckon with. The end is not yet, but I want to
+greet you without a more indecent delay and to impress you with a sense
+of my cordial and seasonable sentiments; such as you will communicate,
+please, unreservedly to les votres around the Xmastide hearth. I am
+spending the so equivocal period with some very quiet old friends at
+this place, and I write this in presence of a shining silvery shimmery
+sea, on one of the prettiest possible south-coast mornings. It's like
+the old Brighton that you may read about (Miss Honeyman's) in the early
+chapters of the "Newcomes." But you are of course bathed, in Paris, in a
+much more sumptuous splendour. But what a triste Nouvel An for the poor
+foolish, or misguided church (not) of France! A little more and "we
+Protestants"--you and I--will have to subscribe for it. Your "Censeur"
+was very welcome, and the portrait of Mme Barboux of the last
+heart-breaking expertness. But somehow these things are all _pen_, as
+if all life had run to it--and one wonders what becomes of the rest (of
+consciousness--save the literary). Yet the literary breaks down with
+them too on occasion--as in the apparent failure to discover that the
+value of Shakespeare is that of the most splendid poetry, as expression,
+that ever was on earth, and that they are reckoning for him apparently
+as by the _langue_ of Sardou. How funnily solemn, or solemnly funny, the
+little Goncourt Academy!--yet when they _have_ made up their mind I
+shall like to hear on whom and what, and you must tell me, and I will
+get the book.
+
+Bill, I am afraid meanwhile, will have been absent from your Yuletide
+revels: if he has gone to Geneva (of the _bise_) as he hinted to me that
+he might and as I don't quite envy him. But a cet age--!... I think I
+really shall see you dans le courant de fevrier. I presently go home to
+work toward that end, _ferme_. I send again a thousand friendships to
+Mrs. Thomas and the Miss Thomases and am always yours and theirs,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Gaillard T. Lapsley._
+
+Mr. Lapsley, now settled in England, had become the neighbour (at
+Cambridge) of Mr. A. C. Benson and the present editor--the "Islander"
+and the "Librarian" of the following letter.
+
+
+/*
+16 Lewes Crescent,
+Brighton.
+
+December 27th, 1906.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear, dear Gaillard,
+*/
+
+I am touched almost to anguish by your beautiful and generous letter,
+and lose not an instant in thanking you for it with the last effusion.
+It is no vain figure of speech, but a solemn, an all-solemn verity,
+that even were I not thus blessedly hearing from you at this felicitous
+time, I should have been, within the next two or three days, writing to
+you, and I had formed and registered the sacred purpose and vow, to tell
+you that really these long lapses of sight and sound of you don't do for
+me at all and that I groan over the strange fatality of this last so
+persistent failure--during long months, years!--of my power to become in
+any way possessed of you. (My own fault, oh yes--a thousand times; for
+which I bow my forehead in the dust.) My intense respect for your so
+noble occupations and your so distinguished "personality" have had a
+good deal to say to the matter, moreover; there is a vulgar untimeliness
+of approach to the highly-devoted and the deeply-cloistered, of which I
+have always hated to appear capable! It is just what I may, however,
+even now be guilty of if I put you the crude question of whether there
+isn't perhaps any moment of this January when you could come to me for a
+couple of deeply amicable days?... I don't quite know what your holidays
+are, nor what heroic immersions in scholastic abysses you may not
+cultivate the depressing ideal of carrying on even while they last, but
+I seem to reflect that you never _will_ be able to come to me free and
+easy (there's a sweet prophecy for you!) and that my only course
+therefore is to tug at you, blindfold, through, and in spite of, your
+tangle of silver coils. I know, no one better, that it's hateful to pay
+visits, and especially winter ones, from (far) and _to_ (far) 'tother
+side of town; but to brood on such invidious truths is simply to plot
+for your escaping me altogether; and I reflect further that you are,
+with your great train-services, decently suburban to London, and that
+the dear old _4.28_ from Charing Cross to Rye brings you down in exactly
+two not discomfortable hours. Also my poor little house is now really
+warm--even hot; I put in very effective hot-water pipes only this
+autumn. Ponder these things, my dear Gaillard--and the further fact that
+I intensely yearn for you!--struggle with them, master them, subjugate
+them; then pick out your pair of days (two full and clear ones with
+_me_, I mean, exclusive of journeys) and let me know that you arrive. I
+hate to worry you about it, and shall understand anything and
+everything; but come if you humanly can.
+
+When I think of the charm of possibly taking up with you by the Lamb
+House fire the various interesting impressions, allusions, American
+references and memories etc., with which your letter is so richly
+bedight, I kind of feel that you _must_ come, to tell me more of
+everything.... So, just yet, I shall reserve these thrills; for I feel
+that I shall and must, by hook or by crook, see you. I expect to go
+abroad about Feb. 5th for a few weeks--but _that_ won't prevent. I
+rejoice to hear your news, however sketchy, of the Islander of Ely and
+the Librarian of Magdalene. Commend me as handsomely as possible to the
+lone Islander--how gladly would I at the very perfect right moment be
+his man Friday, or Saturday, or, even better, Sunday!--and tell Percy
+Lubbock, with my love, that I missed him acutely the other week at
+Windsor (which he will understand and perhaps even believe.) What
+disconcerted me in your letter was your mention of your having, while in
+America, been definitely _ill_--a proceeding of which I wholly
+disapprove. I desire to talk to you about that, too, even though I
+meanwhile discharge upon you, my dear Gaillard, the abounding sympathy
+of yours always and ever,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Bruce Porter._
+
+/#
+ Mr. Bruce Porter had written from San Francisco, describing the
+ earthquake of the preceding spring.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+February 19th, 1907.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Bruce Porter,
+*/
+
+I have had from you a very noble and beautiful letter, which has given
+me exceeding great joy, and which I have only not sooner thanked you
+for--well, by reason of many interruptions and preoccupations--mainly
+those resulting from my being in London (the _hourly_ importunate) when
+it came to me; at which seasons, and during which sojourns, I always put
+off as much correspondence as possible till I get back to this
+comparative peace. (I returned here, but three days since.) How shall I
+tell you, at any rate, today, how your letter touches and even, as it
+were, relieves me? I had felt like such a Backward Brute in writing
+mine, but now in communication with your treasures of indulgence and
+generosity, I feel only your admirable virtue and the high price I set
+upon your friendship. So I thank you, all tenderly, and assure you that
+you have poured balm on much of my anxiety, not to say on my shame. Your
+account of those unimaginable weeks of your great crisis are of a
+thrilling and uplifting interest--and yet everything remains
+unimaginable to me--as to the sense of your whole actual situation; and
+the lurid newspapers, on all this, do nothing but darken and distract my
+vision. I hope you are living in less of a pandemonium than they, basest
+afflictions of our afflicted age, give you out to be--but verily the
+bridge of comprehension is strained and shaky and impassable between
+this little old-world russet shore and your vertiginous cosmic coast.
+Let me cling therefore to you, dear Bruce Porter, _personally_, as to
+the friend of those three or four all but fabulous antediluvian days,
+and keep my hands on you tight, till, by gentle insistent pressure, I
+have made you yield to that delightful possibility of your perhaps at
+some nearish day presenting yourself here. You speak of it as a
+discussable thing--it's the cream of your letter. Let me just say once
+for all you shall have the very eagerest and intensest welcome. Heaven
+therefore speed the day. I go to the continent for a few weeks--eight or
+ten, probably at most--a fortnight hence; but return after that to be
+here in the most continuous fashion for months and months to come--all
+summer and autumn. You are vividly interesting too on the subject of
+Fanny Stevenson and her situation--and your picture is filled out a
+little by my hearing of her as in a rather obscure and inaccessible town
+"somewhere on the Riviera"; communicating with a friend or two in London
+in an elusive and deprecative fashion--withholding her address so as not
+to be overtaken or met with (apparently.) Poor lady, poor barbarous and
+merely _instinctive_ lady--ah, what a tangled web we weave! I probably
+shall fail of seeing her, and yet, with a sneaking kindness for her that
+I have, shall be sorry wholly to lose her. She won't, I surmise, come to
+England. But if I see you here I shall repine at nothing. _Do_ manage to
+be sustained for the gallant pilgrimage--and do let it count a little,
+for that, that I _am_ here, my dear Bruce Porter, ever so clingingly and
+constantly yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Grace Norton._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+March 5th, 1907.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Grace,
+*/
+
+Hideous as is really the time that has elapsed since I last held any
+communication with you (on that torrid July 3d, p.m., in Kirkland St.--I
+won't name the year!) it has seemed to me extraordinarily brief and has
+in fact passed like a flash! Measured by the calendar it's
+incredible--measured by my sense of the way the months whizz by (more
+and _more_ like the telegraph-posts at the window of the train,) it has
+been a simple good "run" from the eve of my leaving America to the
+present moment. I came straight back here--to a great monotony and
+regularity and tranquillity of life (on the whole,) and haven't had
+really (and _shouldn't_ have, didn't I begin to count!) any of the
+conscious desolation of having drifted away from you. However, beginning
+to count makes it another and rather horrible matter--or _would_ make it
+so if you and I ever counted (in the dreary way of "times" of writing,)
+or ever had, or ever will. At the same time I _yearn_ to hear from you,
+and it may increase my chance of that boon if I tell you with all
+urgency how much I do. On that side, though you, through your habitual
+magnanimity, won't "mind" my long silence unduly, I mind it myself, with
+this very first word of my breaking it. Because I'm _talking_ with you
+now again, and that brings back so many, too many things; and to do so
+seems the pleasantest and dearest and most natural thing in the world. I
+leave this place tomorrow for Paris--that is sleep at Dover--but an hour
+and a half hence--and go farther the next day; which is the first time
+I've stirred (except for an occasional week in London) since I last
+stirred out of sight of you. I've been for a long time under the
+promise of going over to see William's Bill, who is working tooth and
+nail, to every appearance, at Julian's studio-- ...If I can I shall dash
+down to Italy--to Florence and Venice--for a short spell before
+restoration--to _this_ domicile--the last time, I daresay, that I shall
+ever brave the distinctly enfeebled spell (as I last felt it to
+be--seven years ago) of those places; so utterly the prey of the
+Barbarian now that if you still ever yearn for them take an easy comfort
+and thank your stars that you knew them in the less blighted and
+dishonoured time. It is very singular to me, living here (in this
+comparatively old-world corner which has nothing else but its _own_
+little immemorial blots and vulgarisms--besides all its great merits) to
+find myself plunged into the strain of the rankest and most promiscuous
+actuality as soon as, crossing to the Continent, I direct myself to the
+shrines of a superior antiquity. One is so out of the stream here that
+one almost wholly forgets it--and then it is incongruously the most
+sacred pilgrimages that most vociferously remind one--because (to put it
+as gracefully as possible) most cosmopolitanly. "Left to myself" I
+really think I should scarce ever budge from here again--unless to go
+back to the U.S., which, honestly, I should like almost as much as I
+should (in some connections--the "travelling" above all) dread it. But
+the dread wouldn't be the same dread of the American-Anglican and German
+Italy. These will strike you as cheerful sentiments for the eve of a
+pleasure-trip abroad, and I shall feel better when I've started; but
+even so the travel-impulse (which I've had almost no opportunity in my
+life really to gratify) is extinct as from inanition (and personal
+antiquity!) and above all, more and more, the only way I care to travel
+is by reading. To stay at home and read is more and more my
+_ideal_--and it's one that you have beautifully realized. I think it
+was the sense of all that it has so admirably done for you that
+confirmed me while I was with you in my high estimation of it. Great,
+every way, dear Grace, and all-exemplary, I thought the dignity and
+coherency and benignity of your life--long after beholding it as it has
+taken me (by the tiresome calendar again!) to make you this declaration.
+I at any rate have the greatest satisfaction in the thought--the
+fireside vision--of your still and always nobly leading it. I don't
+know, and how should I? much about you in detail--but I think I have a
+kind of instinct of how the side-brush of the things that I do get in a
+general way a reverberation of touches and affects you, and as in one
+way or another there seems to have been plenty of the stress and strain
+and pain of life on the circumference (and even some of it at the
+centre, as it were) of your circle, I've not been without feeling (and
+responding to,) I boldly say, _some_ of your vibrations. I hope at least
+the most acute of them have proceeded from causes presenting for
+you--well, what shall I say?--an _interest_!! Even the most worrying
+businesses often have one--but there are sides of them that we could
+discover in talk over the fire but that I don't appeal to you lucidly to
+portray to me. Besides, I can imagine them exquisitely--as well as where
+they fail of that beguilement, and believe me, therefore, I am living
+with you, as I write, quite as much as if I made out--as I used to--by
+your pharos-looking lamplight through your ample and lucid window-pane,
+that you were sitting "in," as they say here, and were thereupon
+planning an immediate invasion. I have given intense ear to every breath
+of indication about Charles and his condition, and in particular to the
+appearance that, so far as I understand, he has been presiding and
+dignifying, as he alone remains to have done, the Longfellow
+centenary--a symptom, as it has seemed to me, of very handsome
+vitality....
+
+I have been very busy all these last months in raising my Productions
+for a (severely-sifted) Collective and Definitive Edition--of which I
+even spoke to you, I think, when I saw you last, as it was then more or
+less definitely planned. Then hitches and halts supervened--the whole
+matter being complicated by the variety and the conflict of my scattered
+publishers, till at last the thing is on the right basis (in the two
+countries--for it has all had to be brought about by quite separate arts
+here and in America,) and a "handsome"--I hope really handsome and not
+too cheap--in fact sufficiently dear--array will be the result--owing
+much to close amendment (and even "rewriting") of the four earliest
+novels and to illuminatory classification, collocation, juxtaposition
+and separation through the whole series. The work on the earlier novels
+has involved much labour--to the best effect for the vile things, I'm
+convinced; but the real tussle is in writing the Prefaces (to each vol.
+or book,) which are to be long--very long!--and loquacious--and
+competent perhaps to _pousser a la vente_. The Edition is to be of 23
+vols. and there are to be some 15 Prefaces (as some of the books are in
+two,) and twenty-three lovely frontispieces--all of which I have this
+winter very ingeniously called into being; so that _they_ at least only
+await "process" reproduction. The prefaces, as I say, are difficult to
+do--but I have found them of a jolly interest; and though I am not going
+to let you read one of the fictions themselves over I shall expect you
+to read all the said Introductions. Thus, my dear Grace, do I--not at
+all artlessly--prattle to you; artfully, on the contrary, toward casting
+some spell of chatter on yourself.... Meanwhile the Irving Street echoes
+that have come to me have been of the din of voices and the affluence of
+strangers and the conflict of nationalities and the rush of
+everything. I don't quite distinguish you in the thick of it, but I
+suppose Shady Hill has had its share. Will you give my tender love there
+when you next go? Will you kindly keep a little in the dark for the
+present my fond chatter about my poor Edition? Above all, dearest Grace,
+will you believe me, through thick and thin, your ever devoted old
+friend,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+[Illustration: PAGE OF "THE AMERICAN" (ORIGINAL VERSION) AS REVISED BY
+HENRY JAMES, 1906]
+
+
+
+
+_To William James, junior._
+
+
+/*
+Grand Hotel, Pau.
+
+March 26, 1907.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Bill,
+*/
+
+This is just a word to tell you that your poor old far-flying Uncle is
+safe and sound and greatly enjoying [himself], so far, after etapes
+consisting of Bois, Poictiers, and Bordeaux, with wonderful minor stops,
+dejeuners and other impressions in between. We got here last night--into
+the balmiest, tepidest, dustiest south, and stay three days or so, for
+excursions, going probably after today's luncheon to Lourdes and back.
+This large, smooth old France is wonderful (_wisely_ seen, as we are
+seeing it,) and I know it already much more infinitely well. The motor
+is a magical marvel--discreetly and honourably used, as we are using
+it--and my hosts are full of amenity, sympathy, appreciation, etc. (as
+well as of wondrous other servanted and avant-courier'd arts of travel,)
+so that we are an excellent combination and most happy family--including
+our most admirable American chauffeur from Lee, Mass., whose native
+Yankee saneness and intelligence (projected into these unprecedented
+conditions) makes me as proud of him as he is of his Panhard car. On
+Thursday or Friday (at furthest) we turn "her" head to Paris--but of
+course with other stops and impressions--though none, I think, of more
+than one night. Don't dream of troubling to write--I will write again as
+we draw nearer. I hope these efflorescent days (if you have them) don't
+turn your stomach too much against the thick taste of the Julian broth.
+I already long to see you again.
+
+/*
+Ever your affectionate
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Howard Sturgis._
+
+/#
+ The plan of approaching Italy through South Germany and Austria was
+ not carried out. He presently went straight from Paris to Rome.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+58 Rue de Varenne, Paris.
+
+April 13th, 1907.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Howard,
+*/
+
+I find your beautiful tragic wail on my return from a wondrous,
+miraculous motor tour of three weeks and a day with these admirable
+friends of ours, who so serve one up all the luxuries of the season and
+all the ripe fruits of time that one's overloaded plate will hold. We
+got back from--from everywhere, literally--last night; and in presence
+of a table groaning under arrears and calendars and other stationery I
+can but, as it were, fold you in my arms. You talk of sad and fearful
+things ... and I don't know what to say to you (at least in this poor
+inky, scratchy way.) What I should like to be able to say is that I will
+come down to Rome and see you even now; but this alas is not in my power
+without my altering all sorts of other pressing arrangements and
+combinations already made. I do hope to go to Rome for a little--a very
+little--stay later; but not before the middle or 20th of May; a time--a
+generally emptier, quieter time--I greatly prefer there to any other. It
+is of extreme importance to me to be (to remain) in Paris till May
+1st--I haven't been here for years and shall probably never once again
+be here (or "come abroad" once again, like you) for the rest of my
+natural life. _Ergo_ I am taking what there is of it for me--I can't
+afford, as it were, not to. And I have made my plans (if they hold) for
+approaching Italy by South Germany, Vienna, Trieste, Venice &c.--all of
+which will bring me to Rome by the 20th of May about, when, I fear, you
+will well nigh--or certainly--have cleared out altogether. From Rome and
+Florence ... I shall return straight home--where at least, then, I must
+infallibly see you. Or shall you pass through this place--homeward--before
+May 1st? The gentlest of lionesses bids me tell you what a tenderest
+welcome you would have from them. Hold up your heart, meanwhile, and
+remember, for God's sake, that there is a point beyond which the follies
+and infirmities of our friends and our _proches_ have no right to ravage
+and wreck our own independence of soul. That quantity is too precious a
+contribution to the saving human sum of good, of lucidity, and we are
+responsible for the _entretien_ of it. So keep yours, shake yours,
+up--well up--my dearest friend, and to this end believe in your
+admirable human use. To be "crushed" is to be of no use; and I for one
+insist that you shall be of some, and the most delightful, to _me_. Feel
+everything, tant que vous voudrez--but _then_ soar superior and don't
+leave tatters of your precious person on every bush that happens to
+bristle with all the avidities and egotisms. We shall judge it all
+sanely and taste it all wisely and talk of it all (even)
+thrillingly--and profitably--yet; and I depend on your keeping that
+appointment with me. This is all, dearest Howard, now. I almost blush
+to break through your obsessions to the point of saying that my three
+weeks of really _seeing_ this large incomparable France in our friend's
+chariot of fire has been almost the time of my life. It's the old
+travelling-carriage way glorified and raised to the 100th power. Will
+you very kindly say to Maud Story for me, with my love, that I am coming
+to Rome very nearly _all_ to see her. I bless your companions and am
+your tout devoue
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Howard Sturgis._
+
+/#
+ From Rome H. J. went to Cernitoio, Mr. Edward Boit's villa near
+ Vallombrosa.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Hotel de Russie, Rome.
+
+May 29th, 1907.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Howard,
+*/
+
+I've been disgustingly silent in spite of your so good prompt, blessed
+letter--but the waters of Rome have been closing over my head, for I
+have, each day, a good part of each, something urgent and imperative to
+do, "for myself," as it were--and everything the hours and the "people"
+bring forth has to be crowded into too scant a margin; with a consequent
+sensation of breathlessness that ill consorts alike with my figure, my
+years and my inclinations. I am "sitting for my bust," into the
+bargain--to Hendrik Andersen (it will be, I think, better than some
+other such work of his,) and that makes practically a great hole of two
+hours and a half in the day--without which, in truth (the promise to
+hold out to the end of the ordeal,) I should already have broken away
+from this now very highly-developed heat and dust and glare. My days
+"abroad" are violently shrinking--I am long since due at home; and my
+yearning for a damp grey temperate clime hourly develops. However, I
+didn't mean to pour forth this plaintive flood--but rather to take a
+fine healthy jolly tone over the fact of your own so happily achieved (I
+trust) liberation from the Roman yoke and your probable inhalation at
+this moment of the fresh air of the summits and of the tonic influence
+of admirable friends. Need I say that I number poor dear deafened
+Rhoda's Florentine contact as among the stimulating?--since it surely
+must take more than deafness, must take utter and cataclysmal
+_dumbness_--and I'm not sure even _that_ would get the better of her
+practical acuity--to make her fall from the tonic. But I'm very sorry--I
+mean for her I trust temporary trouble--and if I but knew where she
+is--which you don't mention--and _when_ departing, or how long staying,
+would reach her if I might. I cherish the thought of getting off Tuesday
+at very latest--if I return intact from a long motor-day that awaits me
+at the hands of the Filippo Filippis on Saturday--as I believe. I drove
+with Mrs. Mason out yesterday afternoon to the Abbotts' villa--that is a
+very charming late afternoon tea-garden, and they told me you are soon
+to have them at Cernitoio. Expansive (not to say expensive) and
+illimitable you! All this time I don't tell you--tell Mildred Seymour--a
+tenth of the comfort I am deriving amid continued tension from the sense
+that _her_ (and your bow is for the time unstrung and hung up for the
+Vallombrosa pines to let the mountain-breeze loosely play with it.... I
+expect to be here till Tuesday a.m.--but I see I've said so. You shall
+then, and so shall Edward Boit (to whom and his girls I send tanti
+saluti, as well as to brave and beneficent Mr. William) have further
+news of yours, my dear Howard, ever affectionately,
+
+/*
+_Henry James_.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Madame Wagniere._
+
+/#
+ The name of this correspondent recalls a meeting at Florence,
+ described in an early letter (vol. i, p. 28). Madame Wagniere (born
+ Huntington) was now living in Switzerland.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Palazzo Barbaro,
+Venice.
+
+June 23rd, 1907.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Laura Wagniere,
+*/
+
+I have waited since getting your good note to have the right moment and
+right light for casting the right sort of longing lingering look on the
+little house with the "_Giardinetto_" on the Canal Grande, to the right
+of Guggenheim as you face Guggenheim. I hung about it yesterday
+afternoon in the gondola with Mrs. Curtis, and we both thought it very
+charming and desirable, only that she has (perhaps a little vaguely)
+heard it spoken of as "damp" which I confess it looks to me just a
+trifle. However, this may be the vainest of calumnies. It does look
+expensive and also a trifle contracted, and is at present clearly
+occupied and with no outward trace of being to let about it at all. For
+myself, in this paradise of great household spaces (I mean Venice
+generally), I kind of feel that even the bribe of the Canal Grande and a
+_giardinetto_ together wouldn't quite reconcile me to the purgatory of a
+very small, really (and not merely relatively) small house.... Mrs.
+Curtis is eloquent on the sacrifices one must make (to a high rent here)
+if one _must_ have, for "smartness," the "Canal Grande" at any price.
+She makes me feel afresh what I've always felt, that what I should
+probably do with my own available ninepence would be to put up with some
+large marble halls in some comparatively modest or remote locality,
+especially _della parte di fondamenta nuova_, etc.; that is, so I got
+there air and breeze and light and _pulizia_ and a dozen other
+conveniences! In fine, the place you covet is no doubt a dear little
+"fancy" place; but as to the question of "coming to Venice" if one can,
+I have but a single passionate emotion, a thousand times Yes! It would
+be for me, I feel, in certain circumstances (were I free, with a hundred
+other facts of my life different,) the solution of all my questions, and
+the consolation of my declining years. Never has the whole place seemed
+to me sweeter, dearer, _diviner_. It leaves everything else out in the
+cold. I wish I could dream of coming to _me mettre dans mes meubles_
+(except that my _meubles_ would look so awful here!) beside you. I
+presume to enter into it with a yearning sympathy. Happy you to be able
+even to discuss it....
+
+This place and this large cool upper floor of the Barbaro, with all the
+space practically to myself, and draughts and scirocco airs playing over
+me indecently undressed, is more than ever delicious and unique.... The
+breath of the lagoon still plays up, but I mingle too much of another
+fluid with my ink, and I have no more clothes to take off.... I greet
+affectionately, yes affectionately, kind Henry, and the exquisite
+gold-haired maiden, and I am, dear Laura Wagniere, your very faithful
+old friend,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+/#
+ The Vicomte Robert d'Humieres, poet and essayist, fell in action in
+ France, April 26, 1915.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+August 11th, 1907.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Edith and my dear Edward,
+*/
+
+The d'Humieres have just been lunching with me, and that has so
+reknotted the silver cord that stretched so tense from the first days of
+last March to the first of those of May--wasn't it?--that I feel it a
+folly in addition to a shame not yet to have written to you (as I have
+been daily and hourly yearning to do) ever since my return from Italy
+about a month ago. You flung me the handkerchief, Edith, just at that
+time--literally cast it at my feet: it met me, exactly,
+bounding--rebounding--from my hall-table as I recrossed my threshold
+after my long absence; which fact makes this tardy response, I am well
+aware, all the more graceless. And then came the charming little
+picture-card of the poor Lamb House hack grinding out his patient prose
+under your light lash and dear Walter B.'s--which should have
+accelerated my production to the point of its breaking in waves at your
+feet: and yet it's only to-night that my overburdened spirit--pushing
+its way, ever since my return, through the accumulations and arrears, in
+every sort, of absence--puts pen to paper for your especial benefit--if
+benefit it be. The charming d'Humieres both, as I say,
+touring--_training_--in England, through horrid wind and weather, with a
+_bonne grace_ and a wit and a Parisianism worthy of a better cause,
+amiably lunched with me a couple of days since on their way from town to
+Folkestone, and so back to Plassac (don't you _like_ "Plassac," down in
+our dear old Gascony?) the seat of M. de Dampierre--to whom, a ce qu'il
+parait, that day at luncheon we were all exquisitely sympathetic! Well,
+it threw back the bridge across the gulfs and the months, even to the
+very spot where the great nobly-clanging glass door used to open to the
+arrested, the engulfing and disgorging car--for we sat in my little
+garden here and talked about you galore and kind of made plans (wild
+vain dreams, though I didn't let _them_ see it!) for our all somehow
+being together again.... But oh, I should like to remount the stream of
+time much further back than their passage here--if it weren't (as it
+somehow always is when I get at urgent letters) ever so much past
+midnight. It was only with my final return hither that my deep draught
+of riotous living came to an end, and as the cup had originally been
+held to my lips all by your hands I somehow felt in presence of your
+interest and sympathy up to the very last, and as if you absolutely
+should have been _avertie_ from day to day--I did the matter that
+justice at least. Too much of the story has by this time dropped out;
+but there are bits I wish I could save for you.... But I must break
+off--it's 1.15 a.m.!
+
+_Aug. 12th._ I wrote you last from Rome, I think--didn't I? but it was
+after that that I heard of your having had at the last awful delays and
+complications, awful _strike_-botherations, over your sailing. I knew
+nothing of them at the time.... I can only hope that the horrid memory
+of it has been brushed and blown away for you by the wind of your
+American kilometres. I remained in Rome--for myself--a goodish while
+after last writing you, and there were charming moments, faint
+reverberations of the old-time refrains--with a happy tendency of the
+superfluous, the incongruous crew to take its departure as the summer
+came on; yet I feel that I shouldn't care if I never saw the perverted
+place again, were it not for the memory of four or five adorable
+occasions--charming chances--enjoyed by the bounty of the Filippis....
+My point is that they carried me in their wondrous car (he drove it
+himself all the way from Paris via Macerata, and with four or five more
+picked-up inmates!) first to two or three adorable Roman excursions--to
+Fiumicino, e.g., where we crossed the Tiber on a medieval raft and then
+had tea--out of a Piccadilly tea-basket--on the cool sea-sand, and for a
+divine day to Subiaco, the unutterable, where I had never been; and
+then, second down to Naples (where we spent two days) and back; going by
+the mountains (the valleys really) and Monte Cassino, and returning by
+the sea--i.e. by Gaeta, Terracina, the Pontine Marshes and the
+Castelli--quite an ineffable experience. This brought home to me with an
+intimacy and a penetration unprecedented how incomparably the old
+_coquine_ of an Italy is the most beautiful country in the world--of a
+beauty (and an interest and complexity of beauty) so far beyond any
+other that none other is worth talking about. The day we came down from
+Posilipo in the early June morning (getting out of Naples and round
+about by that end--the road from Capua on, coming, is archi-damnable) is
+a memory of splendour and style and heroic elegance I never shall
+lose--and never shall renew! No--you will come in for it and Cook will
+picture it up, bless him, repeatedly--but I have drunk and turned the
+glass upside down--or rather I have placed it under my heel and smashed
+it--and the Gipsy life _with_ it!--for ever. (Apropos of smashes, two or
+three days after we had crossed the level crossing of Caianello, near
+Caserta, seven Neapolitan "smarts" were _all_ killed dead--and this by
+no coming of the train, but simply by furious reckless driving and a
+deviation, a _slip_, that dashed them against a rock and made an instant
+end. The Italian driving is _crapulous_, and the roads mostly not good
+enough.) But I mustn't expatiate. I wish I were younger. But for that
+matter the "State Line" would do me well enough this evening--for it's
+again the stroke of midnight. If it weren't I would tell you more. Yes,
+I wish I were to be seated with you to-morrow--catching the breeze-borne
+"burr" from under Cook's fine nose! How is Gross, dear woman, and how
+are Mitou and Nicette--whom I missed so at Monte Cassino? I spent four
+days--out from Florence--at Ned Boit's wondrous--really quite divine
+"eyrie" of Cernitoio, over against Vallombrosa, a dream of Tuscan
+loveliness and a really admirable sejour.... I spent at the last two
+divine weeks in Venice--at the Barbaro. I don't care, frankly, if I
+never see the vulgarized Rome or Florence again, but Venice never seemed
+to me more loveable--though the vaporetto rages. They keep their cars at
+Mestre! and I am devotedly yours both,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Gwenllian Palgrave._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+Aug. 27, 1907.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Gwenllian Palgrave,
+*/
+
+It is quite horrid for me to have to tell you (and after a little delay
+caused by a glut of correspondence, at once, and a pressure of other
+occupations) that your gentle appeal, on your friend's behalf, in the
+matter of the "favourite quotation," finds me utterly helpless and
+embarrassed. The perverse collectress proposes, I fear, to collect the
+impossible! I haven't _a_ favourite quotation--absolutely not: any more
+than I have _a_ favourite day in the year, a favourite letter in the
+alphabet or a favourite wave in the sea! And the collectress, in
+general, has ever found me dark and dumb and odious, and I am too aged
+and obstinate and brutal to change! Such is the sorry tale I have to ask
+you all patiently to hear. I wish you were, or had been, coming over to
+see me from Canterbury--instead of labouring in that barren vineyard of
+other friendship. Do come without fail the next time you are there; and
+believe me your--and your sister's--very faithful even if very
+flowerless and leafless well-wisher from long ago,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To William James._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+October 17th, 1907.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest William,
+*/
+
+...I seem to have followed your summer rather well and intimately and
+rejoicingly, thanks to Bill's impartings up to the time he left me, and
+to the beautiful direct and copious news aforesaid from yourself and
+from Alice, and I make out that I may deem things well with you when I
+see you so mobile and mobilizable (so emancipated and unchained for
+being so,) as well as so fecund and so still overflowing. Your annual go
+at Keene Valley (which I'm never to have so much as beheld) and the
+nature of your references to it--as this one to-night--fill me with
+pangs and yearnings--I mean the bitterness, almost, of envy: there is so
+little of the Keene Valley side of things in my life. But I went up to
+Scotland a month ago, for five days at John Cadwalader's (of N.Y.) vast
+"shooting" in Forfarshire (let to him out of Lord Dalhousie's real
+principality,) and there, in absolutely exquisite weather, had a brief
+but deep draught of the glory of moor and mountain, as that air, and
+ten-mile trudges through the heather and by the brae-side (to lunch
+with the shooters) delightfully give it. It was an exquisite experience.
+But those things are over, and I am "settled in" here, D.V., for a good
+quiet time of urgent work (during the season here that on the whole I
+love best, for it makes for concentration--and il n'y a que ca--for
+_me_!) which will float me, I trust, till the end of February; when I
+shall simply go up to London till the mid-May. No more "abroad" for me
+within any calculable time, heaven grant! Why the devil I didn't write
+to you after reading your _Pragmatism_--how I kept from it--I can't now
+explain save by the very fact of the spell itself (of interest and
+enthralment) that the book cast upon me; I simply sank down, under it,
+into such depths of submission and assimilation that _any_ reaction,
+very nearly, even that of acknowledgment, would have had almost the
+taint of dissent or escape. Then I was lost in the wonder of the extent
+to which all my life I have (like M. Jourdain) unconsciously
+pragmatised. You are immensely and universally _right_, and I have been
+absorbing a number more of your followings-up of the matter in the
+American (Journal of Psychology?) which your devouring devotee Manton
+Marble ... plied, and always on invitation does ply, me with. I feel the
+reading of the book, at all events to have been really the event of my
+summer. In which connection (that of "books"), I am infinitely touched
+by your speaking of having read parts of my American Scene (of which I
+hope Bill has safely delivered you the copy of the English edition) to
+Mrs. Bryce--paying them the tribute of that test of their value. Indeed
+the tribute of your calling the whole thing "koestlich stuff" and saying
+it will remain to _be_ read so and really gauged, gives me more pleasure
+than I can say, and quickens my regret and pain at the way the fates
+have been all against (all finally and definitely now) my having been
+able to carry out my plan and do a second instalment, embodying more and
+complementary impressions. Of course I _had_ a plan--and the second vol.
+would have attacked the subject (and my general mass of impression) at
+various _other_ angles, thrown off various other pictures, in short
+_contributed_ much more. But the thing was not to be....
+
+But I am writing on far into the dead unhappy night, while the rain is
+on the roof--and the wind in the chimneys. Oh your windless (gateless)
+Cambridge! _Choyez-le_! Tell Alice that all this is "for her too," but
+she shall also soon hear further from yours and hers all and always,
+
+/*
+HENRY.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To W. E. Norris._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+December 23rd, 1907.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Norris,
+*/
+
+I want you to find this, as by ancient and inviolate custom, or at least
+intention, on your table on Christmas a.m.; but am convinced that,
+whenever I post it, it will reach you either before or after, and not
+with true dramatic effect. It will take you in any case, however, the
+assurance of my affectionate fidelity--little as anything else for the
+past year, or I fear a longer time, may have contributed to your
+perception of that remembrance. The years and the months go, and somehow
+make our meetings ingeniously rarer and our intervals and silences more
+monstrous. It is the effect, alas, of our being as it were antipodal
+Provincials--for even if one of us were a Capitalist the problem (of
+occasional common days in London) would be by so much simplified. I am
+in London less, on the whole (than during my first years in this
+place;) and as you appear now to be there never, I flap my wings and
+crane my neck in the void. Last spring, I confess, I committed an act of
+comprehensive disloyalty; I went abroad at the winter's end and remained
+till the first days of July (the first half of the time in Paris,
+roughly speaking--and on a long and very interesting, _extraordinarily_
+interesting, motor-tour in France; the second in Rome and Venice, as to
+take leave of _them_ forever.) This took London almost utterly out of my
+year, and I think I heard from Gosse, who happily for him misses you so
+much less than I do, (I mean enjoys you so much more--but no, that isn't
+right either!) that you had in May or June shone in the eye of London. I
+am not this year, however, I thank my stars, to repeat the weird exploit
+of a "long continental absence"--such things have quite ceased to be in
+my real _moeurs_--and I shall therefore plan a campaign in town (for
+May and June) that will have for its leading feature to encounter you
+somewhere and somehow. Till then--that is to a later date than usual--I
+expect to bide quietly here, where a continuity of occupation--strange
+to say--causes the days and the months to melt in my grasp, and where,
+in spite of rather an appalling invasion of outsiders and idlers (a
+spreading colony and a looming menace,) the conditions of life declare
+themselves as emphatically my rustic "fit" as I ten years ago made them
+out to be. I have lived _into_ my little house and garden so thoroughly
+that they have become a kind of domiciliary skin, that can't be peeled
+off without pain--and in fact to go away at all is to have, rather, the
+sense of being flayed. Nevertheless I was glad, last spring, to have
+been tricked, rather, into a violent change of manners and
+practices--violent partly because my ten weeks in Paris were, for me, on
+a basis most unprecedented: I paid a _visit_ of that monstrous length to
+friends (I had never done so in my life before,) and in a beautiful old
+house in the heart of the Rive Gauche, amid old private hotels and
+hidden gardens (Rue de Varenne), tasted socially and associatively, so
+to speak, of a new Paris altogether and got a bellyful of fresh and
+nutritive impressions. Yet I have just declined a repetition of it
+inexorably, and it's more and more vivid to me that I have as much as I
+can tackle to lead my own life--I can't _ever_ again attempt, for more
+than the fleeting hour, to lead other people's. (I have indeed, I should
+add, suffered infiltration of the poison of the motor--contemplatively
+and touringly used: that, truly, is a huge extension of life, of
+experience and consciousness. But I thank my stars that I'm too poor to
+have one.) I'm afraid I've no other adventure to regale you with. I am
+engaged, none the less, in a perpetual adventure, the most thrilling and
+in every way the greatest of my life, and which consists of having more
+than four years entered into a state of health so altogether better than
+I had ever known that my whole consciousness is transformed by the
+intense _alleviation_ of it, and I lose much time in pinching myself to
+see if this be not, really, "none of I." That fact, however, is much
+more interesting to myself than to other people--partly because no one
+but myself was ever aware of the unhappy nature of the physical
+consciousness from which I have been redeemed. It may give a glimmering
+sense of the degree of the redemption, however, that I should, in the
+first place, be willing to fly in the face of the jealous gods by so
+blatant a proclamation of it, and in the second, find the value of it
+still outweigh the formidable, the heaped-up and pressed together burden
+of my years.
+
+But enough of my own otherwise meagre annals.... I must catch my post. I
+haven't sounded you for the least news of your own--it being needless
+to tell you that I hold out my cap for it even as an organ-grinder who
+makes eyes for pence to a gentleman on a balcony: especially when the
+balcony overhangs your luxuriant happy valley and your turquoise sea. I
+go on taking immense comfort in the "Second Home," as I beg your pardon
+for calling it, that your sister and her husband must make for you, and
+am almost as presumptuously pleased with it as if I had invented it. I
+am myself literally eating a baked apple and a biscuit on Xmas evening
+all alone: I have no one in the house, I never dine out here under _any_
+colour (there are to be found people who do!) and I have been deaf to
+the syren voice of Paris, and to other gregarious pressure. But I wish
+you a brave feast and a blameless year and am yours, my dear Norris, all
+faithfully and fondly,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To W. E. Norris._
+
+/#
+ H.J. had inadvertently addressed the preceding letter to 'E. W.
+ Norris Esq.'
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+December 26: 1907.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Norris,
+*/
+
+It came over me in the oddest way, weirdly and dimly, as I lay soaking
+in my hot bath an hour ago, that my jaded and inadvertent hand (I have
+written so many letters in so few days, and you see the effect on
+everyone doubtless but your own impeccably fingered self) superscribed
+my Xmas envelope with the monstrous collocation "E.W."! The effect has
+been probably to make you think the letter a circular and chuck it into
+the fire--or, if you _have_ opened it, to convince you that my handsome
+picture of my "health" is true--if true at all--of my digestion and
+other vulgar parts, at the expense of my brain. Clearly you must
+believe me in distinct cerebral decline. Yet I'm not, I am only--or
+was--in a state of purely and momentarily _manual_ muddle. But the
+curious and interesting thing is: Why, suddenly, as I lay this cold
+morning agreeably _steaming_, did the vision of the hind-part-before
+order come straight at me out of the vapours, after three or four days,
+when I didn't know I was thinking of you?
+
+Well, it only shows how much you are, my dear Norris, in the thoughts of
+yours remorsefully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+P.S. I hope, now, I _did_ do it after all!
+
+
+
+
+_To Dr. and Mrs. J. William White._
+
+/#
+ H.J. had enjoyed the hospitality of these friends at Philadelphia,
+ during his last visit to America.
+#/
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+Jan. 1, 1908.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear William and Letitia!
+*/
+
+It would be monstrous of me to say that what I most valued in William's
+last brave letter was Letitia's gentle "drag" upon it; and I hasten to
+insist that when I dwell on the pleasure so produced by Letitia's
+_presence in it_ (to the extent of her gently "dragging") I feel that
+she at least will know perfectly what I mean! Explain this to William,
+my dear Letitia: I leave all the burden to _you_--so used as you are to
+burdens! It was delightful, I _can_ honestly say, to hear from you no
+long time since--and whether by controlled or uncontrolled inspiration;
+and I tick a small space clear this morning--clear in an air fairly
+black with the correspondence "of the season"--just to focus you fondly
+in it and make, for the friendly sound of my Remington, a penetrable
+medium and a straight course. I am shut up, as mostly, you see, in the
+little stronghold your assault of which has never lost you honour, at
+least--I mean the honour of the brave besieger--however little else it
+may have brought you; and I waggle this small white flag at you, from my
+safe distance, over the battlements, as for a cheerful truce or amicable
+New Year's parley. I think I must figure to you a good deal as a
+"banked-in" Esquimau with his head alone extruding through the sole
+orifice of his hut, or perhaps as a Digger Indian, bursting through his
+mound, by the same perforation, even as a chicken through its shell: by
+reason of the abject immobility practised by me while you and Letitia
+hurl yourselves from one ecstasy of movement, one form of exercise, one
+style of saddled or harnessed or milked or prodded or perhaps merely
+"fattened," quadruped, to another. Your letter--this last--is a noble
+picture of a free quadrupedal life--which gives me the sense, all
+delightful, of seeing you both _alone_ erect and nimble and graceful in
+the midst of the browsing herd of your subjects. Well, it all sounds
+delightfully pastoral to one whose "stable" consists but of the go-cart
+in which the gardener brings up the luggage of those of my visitors
+(from the station) who advance successfully to the _stage_ of that
+question of transport; and my outhouses of the shed under which my
+solitary henchman (but sufficient to a drawbridge that plays so easily
+up!) "attends to the boots" of those confronted with the inevitable
+subsequent phase of early matutinal departure! All of which means, dear
+both of you, that I do seem to read into your rich record the happiest
+evidences of health as well as of wealth. You take my breath away--as,
+for that matter, you can but too easily figure with your ever-natural
+image of me gaping through a crevice of my door!--the only other at all
+equal loss of it proceeding but from my mild daily revolution up and
+down our little local eminence here. No, you won't believe it--that
+these have been my only revolutions since I last risked, at a loophole,
+seeing you thunder past. I shall risk it again when you thunder
+back--and really, though it spoils the consistency of my builded
+metaphor, watch fondly for the charming flash that will precede, and
+prepare! I haven't been even as far as to see the good Abbeys at
+Fairford--was capable of not even sparing that encouragement when she
+kindly wrote to me for a visit toward the autumn's end. I haven't so
+much as pilgrimised to the other shrine in Tite St.--and, having so
+little to tell you, really mustn't prolong this record of my vacancy. I
+am quite spending the winter here--"bracing" for what the spring and
+summer may bring. But I do get, as the very breath of the Spice-islands,
+the balmy sidewind of your general luxuriance, and it makes me glad and
+grateful for you, and keeps me just as much as ever your faithful,
+vigilant, steady, sturdy friend,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+/#
+ The work just finished was the revision of _The High Bid_, shortly
+ to be produced by Mr. and Mrs. Forbes Robertson.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+January 2nd, 1908.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Edith,
+*/
+
+G. T. Lapsley has gone to bed--he has been seeing the New Year in with
+me (generously giving a couple of days to it)--and I snatch this hour
+from out the blizzard of Xmas and Year's End and New Year's Beginning
+missives, to tell you too belatedly how touched I have been with your
+charming little Xmas memento--an exquisite and interesting piece for
+which I have found a very effective position on the little old
+oak-wainscotted wall of my very own room. There it will hang as a fond
+reminder of tout ce que je vous dois. (I am trying to make use of an
+accursed "fountain" pen--but it's a vain struggle; it beats me, and I
+recur to this familiar and well-worn old unimproved utensil.) I have
+passed here a very solitary and _casanier_ Christmastide (of wondrous
+still and frosty days, and nights of huge silver stars,) and yesterday
+finished a job of the last urgency for which this intense concentration
+had been all vitally indispensable. I got the conditions, here at home
+thus, in perfection--I put my job through, and now--or in time--it may
+have, on my scant fortunes, a far-reaching effect. If it does have,
+you'll be the first all generously to congratulate me, and to understand
+why, under the stress of it, I couldn't indeed break my little started
+spell of application by a frolic absence from my field of action. If it,
+on the contrary, fails of that influence I offer my breast to the
+acutest of your silver arrows; though the beautiful charity with which
+you have drawn from your critical quiver nothing more fatally-feathered
+than that dear little framed and glazed, squared and gilded etrenne
+serves for me as a kind of omen of my going unscathed to the end.... I
+admit that it's horrible that we can't--nous autres--talk more face to
+face of the other phenomena; but life is terrible, tragic, perverse and
+abysmal--besides, _patientons_. I can't pretend to speak of the
+phenomena that are now renewing themselves round you; for _there_ is the
+eternal penalty of my having shared your cup last year--that I must
+_taste_ the liquor or go without--there can be no question of my
+otherwise handling the cup. Ah I'm conscious enough, I assure you, of
+going without, and of all the rich arrears that will never--for me--be
+made up--! But I hope for yourselves a thoroughly good and full
+experience--about the possibilities of which, as I see them, there is,
+alas, all too much to say. Let me therefore but wonder and wish!... But
+it's long past midnight, and I am yours and Teddy's ever so affectionate
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Gaillard T. Lapsley._
+
+
+/*
+Reform Club,
+Pall Mall, S.W.
+
+March 17th, 1908.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear, dear Gaillard!
+*/
+
+I can't tell you with what tender sympathy your rather disconcerting
+little news inspires me nor how my heart goes out to you. Alack, alack,
+how we do have to pay for things--and for our virtues and grandeurs and
+beauties (even as you are now doing, overworked hero and model of
+distinguished valour,) as well as for our follies and mistakes. However,
+you _have_ on your record exactly that mistake of too generous a
+sacrifice. Fortunately you have been pulled up before you have quite
+chucked away your all. It must be deuced dreary--yet if you ask me
+whether I think of you more willingly and endurably _thus_, or as your
+image of pale overstrain haunted me after you had left me at the New
+Year, I shall have no difficulty in replying. In fact, dearest Gaillard,
+and at the risk of aggravating you, I _like_ to keep you a little before
+me in the passive, the recumbent, the luxurious and ministered-to
+posture, and my imagination rings all the possible changes on the forms
+of your noble surrender. Lie as _flat_ as you can, and live and think
+and feel and talk (and keep silent!) as idly--and you will thereby be
+laying up the most precious treasure. It's a heaven-appointed
+interlude, and cela ne tient qu'a vous (I mean to the wave of your white
+hand) to let it become a thing of beauty like the masque of _Comus_.
+_Cultivate_, horizontally the waving of that hand--and you will brush
+away, for the time, all responsibilities and superstitions, and the
+peace of the Lord will descend upon you, and you will become as one of
+the most promising little good boys that ever was. Apres quoi the whole
+process and experience will grow interesting, amusing, tissue-making
+(history-making,) to you, and you will, after you get well, feel it to
+have been the time of your life which you'd have been most sorry to
+miss. Some five years ago--or more--a very interesting young friend of
+mine, Paul Harvey (then in the War Office as Private Sec. to Lord
+Lansdowne), was taken exactly as you are, and stopped off just as you
+are and consigned exactly to your place, I think--or rather no, to a
+pseudo-Nordrach in the Mendips. I remember how I sat on just such a
+morning as this at this very table and in this very seat and wrote him
+on this very paper in the very sense in which I am no less confidently
+writing to you--urging him to let himself utterly go and cultivate the
+day-to-day and the hand-to-mouth and the questions-be-damned, even as an
+exquisite fine art. Well, it absolutely and directly and beautifully
+worked: he _recula_--to the very limit--pour mieux sauter, and has since
+_saute'd_ so well that his career has caught him up again.... Your case
+will have gone practically quite on all fours with this. I am drenching
+you with my fond eloquence--but what will you have when you have touched
+me so by writing me so charmingly out of your quiet--though ever so
+shining, I feel--little chamber in the great Temple of Simplification? I
+shall return to the charge--if it be allowed me--and perhaps some small
+sign from you I shall have after a while again. I came up from L.H.
+yesterday only--and shall be in town after this a good deal, D.V.,
+through the rest of this month and April and May. At some stage of your
+_mouvement ascensionnel_ I shall see you--for I hope they won't be
+sending you up quite to Alpine Heights. Take it from me, dear, dear G.,
+that your cure will have a social iridescence, for your acute and ironic
+and genial observation, of the most beguiling kind. But you don't need
+to "take" that or any other wisdom that your beautiful intelligence now
+plays with from any other source but that intelligence; therefore be
+beholden to me almost only for the fresh reassurance that I am more
+affectionately than ever yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+/#
+ The first performance of _The High Bid_ took place in Edinburgh
+ three days after the date of the following.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Roxburghe Hotel, Edinburgh.
+
+March 23rd, 1908.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Edith!
+*/
+
+This is just a tremulous little line to say to you that the daily
+services of intercession and propitiation (to the infernal gods, those
+of jealousy and _guignon_) that I feel sure you have instituted for me
+will continue to be deeply appreciated. They have already borne fruit in
+the shape of a desperate (comparative) calm--in my racked breast--after
+much agitation--and even to-day (Sunday) of a feverish gaiety during the
+journey from Manchester, to this place, achieved an hour ago by special
+train for my whole troupe and its impedimenta--I travelling with the
+animals like the lion-tamer or the serpent-charmer in person and quite
+enjoying the caravan-quality, the bariole Bohemian or _picaresque_ note
+of the affair. Here we are for the last desperate throes--but the omens
+are good, the little play pretty and pleasing and amusing and orthodox
+and mercenary and _safe_ (absit omen!)--cravenly, ignobly _canny_: also
+clearly to be very decently acted indeed: little Gertrude Elliott, on
+whom it so infinitely hangs, showing above all a gallantry, capacity and
+_vaillance_, on which I had not ventured to build. She is a scrap
+(personally, physically) where she should be a presence, and handicapped
+by a face too _small_ in size to be a field for the play of expression;
+but allowing for this she illustrates the fact that intelligence and
+instinct are capables de tout--so that I still hope. And each time they
+worry through the little "piggery" it seems to me more firm and more
+intrinsically without holes and weak spots--in itself I mean; and not
+other in short, than "consummately" artful. I even quite awfully wish
+you and Teddy were to be here--even so far as that do I go! But wire me
+a word--_here_--on Thursday a.m.--and I shall be almost as much
+heartened up. I will send you as plain and unvarnished a one after the
+event as the case will lend itself to. Even an Edinburgh public isn't (I
+mean as we go here all by the London) determinant, of course--however, a
+la guerre comme a la guerre, and don't intermit the burnt-offerings.
+More, more, very soon--and you too will have news for yours and Edward's
+right recklessly even though ruefully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Henry James, junior._
+
+
+/*
+105 Pall Mall, S.W.
+
+April 3rd, 1908.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Harry,
+*/
+
+...The Nightmare of the Edition (of my Works!) is the real _mot de
+l'Enigme_ of all my long gaps and delinquencies these many months
+past--my terror of not keeping sufficiently ahead in doing my part of it
+(all the revising, rewriting, retouching, Preface-making and
+proof-correcting) has so paralysed me--as a panic fear--that I have let
+other decencies go to the wall. The printers and publishers tread on my
+heels, and I feel their hot breath behind me--whereby I keep _at_ it in
+order not to be overtaken. Fortunately I have kept at it so that I am
+almost out of the wood, and the next very few weeks or so will
+completely lay the spectre. The case has been complicated badly,
+moreover, the last month--and even before--by my having, of all things
+in the world, let myself be drawn into a theatrical adventure--which
+fortunately appears to have turned out as well as I could have possibly
+expected or desired. Forbes Robertson and his wife produced on the 26th
+last in Edinburgh--being on "tour," and the provincial production to
+begin with, as more experimental, having good reason in its favour--a
+three-act comedy of mine ("The High Bid")--which is just only the little
+one-act play presented as a "tale" at the end of the volume of the "Two
+Magics"; the one-act play proving really a perfect three-act one,
+dividing itself (by two _short_ entractes, without fiddles) perfectly at
+the right little places as climaxes--with the artful beauty of unity of
+time and place preserved, etc.... It had a _great_ and charming success
+before a big house at Edinburgh--a real and unmistakable victory--but
+what was most brought home thereby is that it should have been
+discharged straight in the face of London. That will be its real and
+best function. This I am hoping for during May and June. It has still to
+be done at Newcastle, Liverpool, etc. (was done this past week three
+times at Glasgow. Of course on tour three times in a week is the most
+they can give a play in a minor city.) But my great point is that
+preparations, rehearsals, _lavishments_ of anxious time over it (after
+completely re-writing it and improving it to begin with) have
+represented a sacrifice of days and weeks to them that have direfully
+devoured my scant margin--thus making my intense nervousness (about
+them) doubly nervous. I left home on the 17th last and rehearsed hard
+(every blessed day) at Manchester, and at Edinburgh till the
+production--having already, three weeks before that in London, given up
+a whole week to the same. I came back to town a week ago to-night (saw a
+second night in Edinburgh, which confirmed the impression of the first,)
+and return to L.H. to-morrow, after a very decent _huitaine de jours_
+here during which I have had quiet mornings, and even evenings, of work.
+I go to Paris about the 20th to stay _10_ days, at the most, with Mrs
+Wharton, and shall be back by May 1st. I yearn to know positively that
+your Dad and Mother arrive definitely on the Oxford job then. I have had
+to be horribly inhuman to them in respect to the fond or repeated
+_expression_ of that yearning--but they will more than understand why,
+"druv" as I've been, and also understand how the prospect of having them
+with me, and being with them, for a while, has been all these last
+months as the immediate jewel of my spur. Read them this letter and let
+it convey to them, all tenderly, that I _live_ in the hope of their
+operative advent, and shall bleed half to death if there be any hitch.
+
+...But I embrace you all in spirit and am ever your fond old Uncle,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To W. D. Howells._
+
+/#
+ The "lucubrations" are of course the prefaces written for the
+ collected edition. The number of volumes was eventually raised to
+ twenty-four, but _The Bostonians_ was not included. The "one thing"
+ referred to, towards the end of this letter, as likely to involve
+ another visit to America would seem to be the possible production
+ there of one of his plays; while the further reason for wishing to
+ return was doubtless connected with his project of writing a novel
+ of which the scene was to be laid in America--the novel that
+ finally became _The Ivory Tower_.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+_Dictated_.
+
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+17th August, 1908.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Howells,
+*/
+
+A great pleasure to me is your good and generous letter just
+received--with its luxurious implied licence for me of seeking this aid
+to prompt response; at a time when a pressure of complications (this is
+the complicated time of the year even in my small green garden) defeats
+too much and too often the genial impulse. But so far as compunction
+started and guided your pen, I really rub my eyes for vision of where it
+may--save as most misguidedly--have come in. You were so far from having
+distilled any indigestible drop for me on that pleasant _ultimissimo_
+Sunday, that I parted from you with a taste, in my mouth, absolutely
+saccharine--sated with sweetness, or with sweet reasonableness, so to
+speak; and aching, or wincing, in no single fibre. Extravagant and
+licentious, almost, your delicacy of fear of the contrary; so much so,
+in fact, that I didn't remember we had even spoken of the heavy
+lucubrations in question, or that you had had any time or opportunity,
+since their "inception," to look at one. However your fond mistake is
+all to the good, since it has brought me your charming letter and so
+appreciative remarks you therein make. My actual attitude about the
+Lucubrations is almost only, and quite inevitably, that they make, to
+me, for weariness; by reason of their number and extent--I've now but a
+couple more to write. This staleness of sensibility, in connection with
+them, blocks out for the hour every aspect but that of their being all
+done, and of their perhaps helping the Edition to sell two or three
+copies more! They will have represented much labour to this latter
+end--though in that they will have differed indeed from no other of
+their fellow-manifestations (in general) whatever; and the resemblance
+will be even increased if the two or three copies _don't_, in the form
+of an extra figure or two, mingle with my withered laurels. They are, in
+general, a sort of plea for Criticism, for Discrimination, for
+Appreciation on other than infantile lines--as against the so almost
+universal Anglo-Saxon absence of these things; which tends so, in our
+general trade, it seems to me, to break the heart. However, I am afraid
+I'm too sick of the mere doing of them, and of the general strain of the
+effort to avoid the deadly danger of repetition, to say much to the
+purpose about them. They ought, collected together, none the less, to
+form a sort of comprehensive manual or _vade-mecum_ for aspirants in our
+arduous profession. Still, it will be long before I shall want to
+collect them together for that purpose and furnish _them_ with a final
+Preface. I've done with prefaces for ever. As for the Edition itself, it
+has racked me a little that I've had to leave out so many things that
+would have helped to make for rather a more vivid completeness. I don't
+at all regret the things, pretty numerous, that I've omitted from
+deep-seated preference and design; but I do a little those that are
+crowded out by want of space and by the rigour of the 23 vols., and 23
+only, which were the condition of my being able to arrange the matter
+with the Scribners at all. Twenty-three do seem a fairly blatant
+array--and yet I rather surmise that there may have to be a couple of
+supplementary volumes for certain too marked omissions; such being, on
+the whole, detrimental to an all professedly comprehensive presentation
+of one's stuff. Only these, I pray God, without Prefaces! And I have
+even, in addition, a dim vague view of re-introducing, with a good deal
+of titivation and cancellation, the too-diffuse but, I somehow feel,
+tolerably full and good "Bostonians" of nearly a quarter of a century
+ago; that production never having, even to my much-disciplined patience,
+received any sort of justice. But it will take, doubtless, a great deal
+of artful re-doing--and I haven't, now, had the courage or time for
+anything so formidable as touching and re-touching it. I feel at the
+same time how the series suffers commercially from its having been
+dropped so completely out. _Basta pure--basta!_
+
+I am charmed to hear of your Roman book and beg you very kindly to send
+it me directly it bounds into the ring. I rejoice, moreover, with much
+envy, and also a certain yearning and impotent non-intelligence, at your
+being moved to-day to Roman utterance--I mean in presence of the so
+bedrenched and vulgarised (I mean more particularly _commonised_) and
+transformed City (as well as, alas, more or less, Suburbs) of our
+current time. There was nothing, I felt, to myself, I could _less_ do
+than write again, in the whole presence--when I was there some fifteen
+months agone. The idea of doing so (even had any periodical wanted my
+stuff, much less bid for it) would have affected me as a sort of
+give-away of my ancient and other reactions in presence of all the
+unutterable old Rome I originally found and adored. It would have come
+over me that if those ancient emotions of my own meant anything, no
+others on the new basis could mean much; or if any on the new basis
+should pretend to sense, it would be at the cost of all imputable
+coherency and sincerity on the part of my prime infatuation. In spite,
+all the same, of which doubtless too pedantic view--it only means, I
+fear, that I am, to my great disadvantage, utterly bereft of any
+convenient journalistic ease--I am just beginning to re-do ... certain
+little old Italian papers, with titivations and expansions, in form to
+match with a volume of "English Hours" re-fabricated three or four years
+ago on the same system. In this little job I shall meet again my not
+much more than scant, yet still appreciable, old Roman stuff in my
+path--and shall have to commit myself about it, or about its general
+subject, somehow or other. I shall trick it out again to my best
+ability, at any rate--and to the cost, I fear, of your thinking I have
+retitivation on the brain. I haven't--I only have it on (to the end that
+I may then have it a little consequently _in_) the flat pocket-book. The
+system has succeeded a little with "English Hours"; which have sold
+quite vulgarly--for wares of mine; whereas the previous and original
+untitivated had long since dropped almost to nothing. In spite of which
+I could really shed salt tears of impatience and yearning to get back,
+after so prolonged a blocking of traffic, to too dreadfully postponed
+and neglected "creative" work; an accumulated store of ideas and
+reachings-out for which even now clogs my brain.
+
+We are having here so bland and beautiful a summer that when I receive
+the waft of your furnace-mouth, blown upon my breakfast-table every few
+days through the cornucopia, or improvised resounding trumpet, of the
+Times, I groan across at my brother William (now happily domesticated
+with me:) "Ah why _did_ they, poor infatuated dears? why _did_
+they?"--and he always knows I mean Why did you three hie you home from
+one of the most beautiful seasons of splendid cool summer, or splendid
+summery cool, that ever was, just to swoon in the arms of your Kittery
+_genius loci_ (genius of perspiration!)--to whose terrific embrace you
+saw me four years ago, or whatever terrible time it was, almost utterly
+succumb. In my small green garden here the elements have been, ever
+since you left, quite enchantingly mixed; and I have been quite happy
+and proud to show my brother and his wife and two of his children, who
+have been more or less collectively and individually with me, what a
+decent English season can be....
+
+Let me thank you again for your allusion to the slightly glamour-tinged,
+but more completely and consistently forbidding and forbidden, lecture
+possibility. I refer to it in these terms because in the first place I
+shouldn't have waited till now for it, but should have waked up to it
+eleven years ago; and because in the second there are other, and really
+stouter things too, definite ones, I want to do, with which it would
+formidably interfere, and which are better worth my resolutely
+attempting. I never have had such a sense of almost bursting, late in
+the day though it be, with violent and lately too much repressed
+creative (again!) intention. I _may_ burst before this intention fairly
+or completely flowers, of course; but in that case, even, I shall
+probably explode to a less distressing effect than I should do, under
+stress of a fatal puncture, on the too personally and physically
+arduous, and above all too gregariously-assaulted (which is what makes
+it most arduous) lecture-platform. There is one thing which may
+conceivably (if it comes within a couple of years) take me again to the
+_contorni_ of Kittery; and on the spot, once more, one doesn't know what
+might happen. _Then_ I should take grateful counsel of you with all the
+appreciation in the world. And I _want_ very much to go back for a
+certain thoroughly practical and special "artistic" reason; which would
+depend, however, on my being able to pass my time in an ideal
+combination of freedom and quiet, rather than in a luridly real one of
+involved and exasperated exposure and motion. But I may still have to
+talk to you of this more categorically; and won't worry you with it till
+then. You wring my heart with your report of your collective Dental
+pilgrimage to Boston in Mrs Howells' distressful interest. I read of it
+from your page, somehow, as I read of Siberian or Armenian or Macedonian
+monstrosities, through a merciful attenuating veil of Distance and
+Difference, in a column of the Times. The distance is half the
+globe--and the difference (for me, from the dear lady's active
+afflictedness) that of having when in America undergone, myself, so
+prolonged and elaborate a torture, in the Chair of Anguish, that I am
+now on t'other side of Jordan altogether, with every ghost, even, of a
+wincing nerve extinct and a horrible inhuman acheless void installed as
+a substitute. Void or not, however, I hope Mrs Howells, and you all, are
+now acheless at least, and am yours, my dear Howells, ever so
+faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+P.S. With all of which I catch myself up on not having told you,
+decently and gratefully, of the always sympathetic attention with which
+I have read the "Fennel and Rue" you so gracefully dropped into my lap
+at that last hour, and which I had afterwards to toy with a little
+distractedly before getting the right peaceful moments and right
+retrospective mood (this in order to remount the stream of time to the
+very Fontaine de Jouvence of your subject-matter) down here. For what
+comes out of it to me more than anything else is the charming freshness
+of it, and the general miracle of your being capable of this under the
+supposedly more or less heavy bloom of a rich maturity. There are places
+in it in which you recover, absolutely, your first fine rapture. You
+confound and dazzle me; so go on recovering--it will make each of your
+next things a new document on immortal freshness! I can't remount--but
+can only drift on with the thicker and darker tide: wherefore pray for
+me, as who knows what may be at the end?
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+October 13th, 1908.
+*/
+
+/*
+My very dear Friend,
+*/
+
+I cabled you an hour ago my earnest hope that you _may_ see your way to
+sailing ... on the 20th--and if you _do_ manage that, this won't catch
+you before you start. Nevertheless I can't not write to you--however
+briefly (I mean on the chance of my letter being useless)--after
+receiving your two last, of rapprochees dates, which have come within a
+very few days of each other--that of Oct. 5th only to-day. I am deeply
+distressed at the situation you describe and as to which my power to
+suggest or enlighten now quite miserably fails me. I move in darkness; I
+rack my brain; I gnash my teeth; I don't pretend to understand or to
+imagine.... Only sit tight yourself _and go through the movements of
+life_. That keeps up our connection with life--I mean of the immediate
+and apparent life; behind which, all the while, the deeper and darker
+and unapparent, in which things _really_ happen to us, learns, under
+that hygiene, to stay in its place. Let it get out of its place and it
+swamps the scene; besides which its place, God knows, is enough for it!
+Live it all through, every inch of it--out of it something valuable will
+come--but live it ever so quietly; and--_je maintiens mon
+dire_--waitingly!... What I am really hoping is that you'll be on your
+voyage when this reaches the Mount. If you're not, you'll be so very
+soon afterwards, won't you?--and you'll come down and see me here and
+we'll talk a perte de vue, and there will be something in that for both
+of us.... Believe meanwhile and always in the aboundingly tender
+friendship--the understanding, the participation, the _princely_ (though
+I say it who shouldn't) hospitality of spirit and soul of yours more
+than ever,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To J.B. Pinker._
+
+/#
+ By this time the monthly issue of the volumes of the "New York"
+ edition was well under way--with the discouraging results to be
+ inferred from the following letter.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+October 23rd, 1908.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Pinker,
+*/
+
+All thanks for your letter this a.m. received. I have picked myself up
+considerably since Tuesday a.m., the hour of the shock, but I think it
+would ease off my nerves not a little to see you, and should be glad if
+you could come down on Monday next, 26th, say--by the 4.25, and dine and
+spend the night. If Monday _isn't_ convenient to you, I must wait to
+indicate some other near subsequent day till I have heard from a person
+who is to come down on one of those dates and whom I wish to be free of.
+I am afraid my anticlimax _has_ come from the fact that since the
+publication of the Series began no dimmest light or "lead" as to its
+actualities or possibilities of profit has reached me--whereby, in the
+absence of special warning, I found myself concluding in the sense of
+some probable fair return--beguiled thereto also by the measure, known
+only to myself, of the treasures of ingenuity and labour I have lavished
+on the ameliorations of every page of the thing, and as to which I felt
+that they couldn't _not_ somehow "tell." I warned _myself_ indeed, and
+kept down my hopes--said to myself that any present payments would be
+moderate and fragmentary--very; but this didn't prevent my rather
+building on something that at the end of a very frequented and invaded
+and hospitable summer might make such a difference as would outweigh--a
+little--my so disconcerting failure to get anything from ----. The
+non-response of _both_ sources has left me rather high and dry--though
+not so much so as when I first read Scribner's letter. I have recovered
+the perspective and proportion of things--I have committed, thank God,
+no anticipatory _follies_ (the worst is having made out my income-tax
+return at a distinctly higher than at all warranted figure!--whereby I
+shall have early in 1909 to pay--as I even did last year--on parts of an
+income I have never received!)--and, above all, am aching in every bone
+to get back to out-and-out "creative" work, the long interruption of
+which has fairly sickened and poisoned me. (_That_ is the real hitch!) I
+am afraid that moreover in my stupidity before those unexplained--though
+so grim-looking!--figure-lists of Scribner's I even seemed to make out
+that a certain $211 (a phrase in his letter seeming also to point to
+that interpretation) _is_, all the same, owing me. But as you say
+nothing about this I see that I am probably again deluded and that the
+mystic screed meant it is still owing _them_! Which is all that is
+wanted, verily, to my sad rectification! However, I am now, as it were,
+prepared for the worst, and as soon as I can get my desk _absolutely_
+clear (for, like the convolutions of a vast smothering boa-constrictor,
+_such_ voluminosities of Proof--of the Edition--to be carefully
+read--still keep rolling in,) that mere fact will by itself considerably
+relieve me. And I have _such_ visions and arrears of inspiration--! But
+of these we will speak--and, as I say, I shall be very glad if you can
+come Monday. Believe me, yours ever,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Ellen Emmet._
+
+/#
+ H. J.'s interest in the work of this "paintress-cousin" (afterwards
+ Mrs. Blanchard Rand) has already appeared in a letter to her
+ mother, Mrs. George Hunter (vol. i, p. 258).
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+November 2d, 1908.
+*/
+
+...I have taken moments, beloved Bay, to weep, yes to bedew my pillow
+with tears, over the foul wrong I was doing _you_ and the generous and
+delightful letter I so long ago had from you--and in respect to whose
+noble bounty your present letter, received only this evening and already
+moving me to this feverish response, is a heaping, on my unworthy head,
+of coals of fire. It is delightful at any rate, dearest Bay, to be in
+relation with you again, and to hear your sweet voice, as it were, and
+to smell your glorious paint and turpentine--to inhale, in a word, both
+your goodness and your glory; and I shall never again consent to be
+deprived of the luxury of you (long enough to notice it) on any terms
+whatever....
+
+_November 3d._ I had to break off last night and go to bed--and as it is
+now much past mid-night again I shall almost surely not finish, but only
+scrawl you a few lines more and then take you up to London with me and
+go on with you there, as I am obliged to make that move, for a few days,
+by the 9.30 a.m. Among the things I have to do is to go to see my
+portrait by Jacques Blanche at the Private View of the New Gallery
+autumn show--he having "done" me in Paris last May (he is now quite the
+Bay Emmet of the London--in particular--portrait world, and does all the
+billionaires and such like: that's where _I_ come in--very big and fat
+and uncanny and "brainy" and awful when I last saw myself--so that I now
+quite tremble at the prospect, though he has done a rather wondrous
+thing of Thomas Hardy--who, however, lends himself. I will add a word to
+this after I have been to the N.G., and if I _am_ as unnatural as I
+fear, you must settle, really, to come out and avenge me.) ... When you
+see William, to get on again with _his_ portrait--in which I am
+infinitely and yearningly interested--as I am in every invisible stroke
+of your brush, over which I ache for baffled curiosity or
+wonderment--when you _do_ go on to Cambridge (sooner, I trust, than
+later) he and Alice and Peggy will have much to tell you about their
+quite long summer here, lately brought to a close, and about poor little
+old Lamb House and its corpulent, slowly-circulating and
+slowly-masticating master. It was an infinite interest to have them here
+for a good many weeks--they are such endlessly interesting people, and
+Alice such a heroine of devotion and of everything. We have had a
+wondrous season--a real golden one, for weeks and weeks--and still it
+goes on, bland and breathless and changeless--the rarest autumn (and
+summer, from June on) known for years: a proof of what this much-abused
+climate is capable of for benignity and convenience. Dear little old
+Lamb House and garden have really become very pleasant and developed
+through being much (and virtuously) lived in, and I do wish you would
+come out and add another flourish to its happy sequel. But I _must_ go
+to bed, dearest Bay--I'm ashamed to tell you what sort of hour it is.
+But I've not done with you yet.
+
+
+_105 Pall Mall._ November 6th. I've been in town a couple of days
+without having a moment to return to this--for the London tangle
+immediately begins. What it will perhaps most interest you to know is
+that I "attended" yesterday the Private View of the Society of Portrait
+Painters' Exhibition and saw Blanche's "big" portrait of poor H. J. (His
+two exhibits are that one and one of himself--the latter very flattered,
+the former not.) The "funny thing about it" is that whereas I sat in
+almost full face, and left it on the canvas in that bloated aspect when
+I quitted Paris in June, it is now a splendid Profile, and with the body
+(and _more_ of the body) in a quite different attitude; a wonderful
+_tour de force_ (the sort of thing _you_ ought to do if you understand
+your real interest!)--consisting of course of his having begun the whole
+thing afresh on a new canvas after I had gone, and worked out the
+profile, in my absence, by the aid of fond memory ("secret notes" on my
+silhouette, he also says, surreptitiously taken by him) and several
+photographs (also secretly taken at that angle while I sat there with my
+whole beauty, as I supposed, turned on. The result is wonderfully "fine"
+(for _me_)--_considering_! I think one sees a little that it's a
+_chic'd_ thing, but ever so much less than you'd have supposed. He dines
+with me to-night and I will get him to give me two or three photographs
+(of the picture, not of _me_) and send them to you, for curiosity's
+sake. But I really think that (for a certain _style_--of presentation
+of H.J.--that it has, a certain dignity of intention and of
+indication--of who and what, poor creature, he _is_!) it ought to be
+seen in the U.S. He (Blanche) wants to go there himself--so put in all
+your own triumphs first. However, it would _kill_ him--so his triumphs
+would be brief; and yours would then begin again. Meanwhile he was
+almost as agreeable and charming and beguiling to sit to, as _you_, dear
+Bay, in your own attaching person--which somebody once remarked to me
+explained _half_ the "run" on you!... Dear Gaillard Lapsley (I hope
+immensely you'll see _him_ on his way to Colorado or wherever) has given
+me occasional news of Eleanor and Elizabeth--in which I have
+rejoiced--seeming to hear their nurseries ring with the echo of their
+prosperity. As they must now have children enough for them to take care
+of _each other_ (haven't they?) I hope they are thinking of profiting by
+it to come out here again--where they are greatly desired.... _But_,
+beloved Bay, I must get this off now. I send tenderest love to the
+Mother and the Sister; I beseech you not to let your waiting laurel,
+here, wither ungathered, and am ever your fondest,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To George Abbot James._
+
+/#
+ This refers to the death of Mrs. G. A. James, sister of the Hon. H.
+ Cabot Lodge, Senior Senator for Massachusetts. H. J.'s friendship
+ with his correspondent, dating from early years, is commemorated in
+ _Notes of a Son and Brother_.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+Nov. 26th, 1908.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear old Friend,
+*/
+
+Mrs. Lodge has written to me, and I have answered her letter, but I long
+very particularly to hold out my hand to you in person, and take your
+own and keep it a moment ever so tenderly and faithfully. All these
+months I haven't known of the blow that has descended on you or I'm sure
+you feel that I would have made you some sign. My communications with
+Boston are few and faint in these days--though what I do hear has in
+general more or less the tragic note. You must have been through much
+darkness and living on now in a changed world. I hadn't seen her, you
+know, for long years, and as I have just said to Mrs. Lodge, always
+thought of her, or remembered her, as I saw her in youth--charming and
+young and bright, animated and eager, with life all before her. Great
+must be your alteration. I wonder about you and yet spend my wonder in
+vain, and somehow think we were meant not so to miss--during long
+years--sight and knowledge of each other. But life does strange and
+incalculable things with us all--life which I myself still find
+interesting. I have a hope that you do--in spite of everything. I wish I
+hadn't so awkwardly failed, practically, of seeing you when I was in
+America; then I should be better able to write to you now. Make me some
+sign--wonderful above all would be the sign that in great freedom you
+might come again at last to _these_ regions of the earth. How I should
+hold out my hands to you! But perhaps you stick, as it were, to your
+past.... I don't _know_, you see, and I can only make you these
+uncertain, yet all affectionate motions. The best thing I can tell you
+about myself is that I have no second self to part with--having lived
+always deprived! But I've had other things, and may you still find you
+have--a few! Don't fail of feeling me at any rate, my dear George, ever
+so tenderly yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Hugh Walpole._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+December 13th, 1908.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear young friend Hugh Walpole,
+*/
+
+I had from you some days ago a very kind and touching letter, which
+greatly charmed me, but which now that I wish to read it over again
+before belatedly thanking you for it I find I have stupidly and
+inexplicably mislaid--at any rate I can't to-night put my hand on it.
+But the extremely pleasant and interesting impression of it abides with
+me; I rejoice that you were moved to write it and that you didn't resist
+the generous movement--since I always find myself (when the rare and
+blest revelation--once in a blue moon--takes place) the happier for the
+thought that I enjoy the sympathy of the gallant and intelligent young.
+I shall send this to Arthur Benson with the request that he will kindly
+transmit it to you--since I fail thus, provokingly, of having your
+address before me. I gather that you are about to hurl yourself into the
+deep sea of journalism--the more treacherous currents of which (and they
+strike me as numerous) I hope you may safely breast. Give me more news
+of this at some convenient hour, and let me believe that at some
+propitious one I may have the pleasure of seeing you. I never see A.C.B.
+in these days, to my loss and sorrow--and if this continues I shall have
+to depend on you considerably to give me tidings of him. However, my
+appeal to him (my only resource) to put you in possession of this will
+perhaps strike a welcome spark--so you see you are already something of
+a link. Believe me very truly yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To George Abbot James._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+Dec. 21st, 1908.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear dear George--
+*/
+
+How I wish I might for a while be with you, or that you were here a
+little with me! I am deeply touched by your letter, which makes me feel
+all your desolation. Clearly you have lived for long years in a union so
+close and unbroken that what has happened is like a violent and
+unnatural mutilation and as if a part of your very self had been cut
+off, leaving you to go through the movements of life without
+it--movements for which it had become to you indispensable. Your case is
+rare and wonderful--the suppression of the _other_ relations and
+complications and contacts of our common condition, for the most
+part--and such as no example of seems possible in _this_ more infringing
+and insisting world, over here--which creates all sorts of
+_inevitabilities_ of life round about one; perhaps for props and
+crutches when the great thing falls--perhaps rather toward making any
+one and absorbing relation less intense--I don't pretend to say! But you
+sound to me so lonely--and I wish I could read more human furniture, as
+it were, into your void. And I can't even speak as if I might plan for
+seeing you--or dream of it with any confidence. The roaring, rushing
+world seems to me myself--with its brutal and vulgar racket--all the
+while a less and less enticing place for moving about in--and I ask
+myself how one can think of your turning to it at this late hour, and
+after the long luxury, as it were, of your so united and protected
+independence. Still, what those we so love have done _for_ us doesn't
+wholly fail us with their presence--isn't that true? and you are feeling
+it at times, I'm sure, even while your ache is keenest. In fact their
+so making us ache is one way for us of their being with us, of our
+holding on to them after a fashion. But I talk, my dear George, for mere
+tenderness--and so I say vain words--with only the _fact_ of my
+tenderness a small thing to touch you. I have known you from so far
+back--and your image is vivid and charming to me through
+everything--through everything. Things abide--_good_ things--for that
+time: and we hold together even across the grey wintry sea, near which
+perhaps we both of us are to-night. I should have a lonely Christmas
+here were not a young nephew just come to me from his Oxford tutor's.
+You don't seem to have even that. But you have the affectionate thought
+of yours always,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To W.E. Norris._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+December 23rd, 1908.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Norris,
+*/
+
+I have immensely rejoiced to hear from you to-night, though I swear on
+my honour that that has nothing to do with this inveterate--isn't
+it?--and essentially pious pleasure, belonging to the date, of making
+you myself a sign. I have had the sad sense, for too long past, of being
+horrid, however (of never having acknowledged--at the psychological
+moment--your beautiful and interesting last;) and it has been for me as
+if I should get no more than my deserts were you to refuse altogether
+any more commerce with me. Your noble magnanimity lifting that shadow
+from my spirit, I perform _this_ friendly function now, with a lighter
+heart and a restored confidence. Being horrid (in those ways,) none the
+less, seems to announce itself as my final doom and settled attitude: I
+grow horrider and horrider (as a correspondent) as I grow more aged and
+more obese, without at the same time finding that my social air clears
+itself as completely as those vices or disfigurements would seem
+properly to guarantee. Most of my friends and relatives are dead, and a
+due proportion of the others seem to be dying; in spite of which my
+daily prospect, these many months past, has bristled almost
+overwhelmingly with People, and to People more or less on the spot, or
+just off it, in motors (and preparing to be more than ever on it again,)
+or, most of all haling me up to town for feverish and expensive dashes,
+in the name of damnable and more than questionable duties, interests,
+profits and pleasures--to such unaccountable and irrepressible hordes, I
+say, I keep having to sacrifice heavily. The world, to my great
+inconvenience--that is the London aggregation of it--insists on treating
+me as suburban--which gives me thus the complication without my having
+any of the corresponding ease (if ease there be) of the state; and
+appalling is the immense incitement to that sort of invasion or
+expectation that the universal motor-use (hereabouts) compels one to
+reckon with. But this is a profitless groan--drawn from me by a
+particularly ravaged summer and autumn, as it happens--and at a season
+of existence and in general conditions in which one had fixed one's
+confidence on precious simplifications. A house and a little garden and
+a little possible hospitality, in a little supposedly picturesque place
+60 miles from London are, in short, stiff final facts that (in our more
+and more awful age) utterly decline to be simplified--and here I sit in
+the midst of them and exhale to you (to you almost only!) my helpless
+plaint. Fortunately, for the moment, I take the worst to be over. I've a
+young--a very young--American nephew who has come to me from his Oxford
+tutor to spend Xmas, and I have, in order to amuse him, engaged to go
+with him to-morrow and remain till Saturday with some friends six miles
+hence; but after that I cling to the vision of a great stretch of
+undevastated time here till April, or better still May, when I may go up
+to town for a month. Absorbing occupations--the only ones I really care
+for--await me in abysmal arrears--but I spare you my further overflow.
+
+It has kept me really all this time from saying to you what I had
+infinitely more on my mind--how my sense of your Torquay life, with all
+that violent sadness, that great gust of extinction, breathed upon it,
+has kept you before me as a subject of much affectionate speculation. Of
+course you've picked up your life after a fashion; but we never pick up
+_all_--too much of it lies there broken and ended. But I seem to see you
+going on, as you're so gallantly capable of doing, in the manner of one
+for whom nothing more has happened than you were naturally prepared for
+in a world that you decently abstain from characterizing--and I
+congratulate you again on your mastery of the art of life--of the
+Torquay variety of it in particular. (We have to decide on the kind we
+will master--but I haven't mastered this kind!) I at any rate saw Gosse
+in town some three weeks ago, and he spoke of having seen you not long
+previous and of the excellent figure you made to him. (I didn't know you
+were there--but indeed a certain turmoil about me here--speaking as a
+man loving his own hours and his own company--must have been then, I
+think, at its thickest.) ... I hope something or other pleasant has
+brushed you with its wing--and even that you've been able to put forth a
+quick hand and seize it. If so, keep tight hold of it--nurse it in your
+bosom--for 1909--and believe me, my dear Norris, yours always and ever,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Henry White._
+
+/#
+ Mr. White was at this time American Ambassador in Paris.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+Dec. 29, 1908.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Margaret White,
+*/
+
+I sit here to-night, I quite crouch by my homely little fireside,
+muffled in soundless snow--where the loud tick of the clock is the
+_only_ sound--and give myself up to the charmed sense that in your
+complicated career, amid all the more immediate claims of the _bonne
+annee_, you have been moved to this delightful sign of remembrance of an
+old friend who is on the whole, and has always been, condemned to lose
+so much more of you (through divergence of ways!) than he has been
+privileged to enjoy. Snatches, snatches, and happy and grateful
+moments--and then great empty yearning intervals only--and under all the
+great ebbing, melting, and irrecoverableness of life! But this is almost
+a happy and grateful moment--almost a _real_ one, I mean--though again
+with bristling frontiers, long miles of land and water, doing their best
+to make it vain and fruitless. You live on the crest of the wave, and I
+deep down in the hollow--and your waves seem to be all crests, just as
+mine are only concave formations! I feel at any rate very much in the
+hollow these winter months--when great adventures, like Paris, look far
+and formidable, and I see a domestic reason for sitting tight wherever I
+turn my eyes. That reads as if I had thirteen children--or thirty
+wives--instead of being so lone and lorn; but what it means is that I
+have, in profusion, modest, backward labours. We have been having here
+lately the great and glorious pendulum in person, Mrs. Wharton, on her
+return oscillation, spending several weeks in England, for almost the
+first time ever and having immense success--so that I think she might
+fairly fix herself here--if she could stand it! But she is to be at 58
+Rue de Varenne again from the New Year and you will see her and she will
+give you details. _My_ detail is that though she has kindly asked me to
+come to them again there this month or spring I have had to plead simple
+abject terror--terror of the pendulous life. I am a _stopped_ clock--and
+I strike (that is I caper about) only when very much wound up. Now I
+don't have to be wound up at all to tell you what a yearning I have to
+see you all back _here_--and what a kind of sturdy faith that I
+absolutely shall. Then your crest will be much nearer my hollow, and
+vice versa, and you will be able to look down quite _straight_ at me,
+and we shall be almost together again--as we really must manage to be
+for these interesting times to come. I don't want to miss any more
+Harry's freshness of return from the great country--with the golden
+apples of his impression still there on the tree. I have always only
+tasted them plucked by other hands and--baked! I want to munch these
+_with_ you--en famille. Therefore I confidently await and evoke you. I
+delight in these proofs of strength of your own and am yours always and
+ever,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To W. D. Howells._
+
+/#
+ H. J.'s tribute to the memory of his old friend, Professor C. E.
+ Norton, is included in _Notes on Novelists_.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+New Year's Eve, 1908.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Howells,
+*/
+
+I have a beautiful Xmas letter from you and I respond to it on the spot.
+It tells me charming things of you--such as your moving majestically
+from one beautiful home to another, apparently still more beautiful;
+such as the flow of your inspiration never having been more various and
+more torrential--and all so deliciously remunerated an inspiration; such
+as your having been on to dear C. E. N.'S obsequies--what a Cambridge
+_date_ that, even for you and me--and having also found time to see and
+"appreciate" my dear collaterals, of the two generations (aren't they
+extraordinarily good and precious collaterals?); such, finally, as your
+recognising, with so fine a charity, a "message" in the poor little old
+"Siege of London," which, in all candour, affects me as pretty dim and
+rococo, though I did lately find, in going over it, that it holds quite
+well together, and I touched it up where I could. I have but just come
+to the end of my really very insidious and ingenious labour on behalf of
+all that series--though it has just been rather a blow to me to find
+that I've come (as yet) to no reward whatever. I've just had the
+pleasure of hearing from the Scribners that though the Edition began to
+appear some 13 or 14 months ago, there is, on the volumes already out,
+no penny of profit owing me--of that profit to which I had partly been
+looking to pay my New Year's bills! It will have landed me in
+Bankruptcy--unless it picks up; for it has prevented my doing any other
+work whatever; which indeed must now begin. I have fortunately broken
+ground on an American novel, but when you draw my ear to the liquid
+current of your own promiscuous abundance and facility--a flood of many
+affluents--I seem to myself to wander by contrast in desert sands. And I
+find our art, all the while, more difficult of practice, and want, with
+that, to do it in a more and more difficult way; it being really, at
+bottom, only difficulty that interests me. Which is a most accursed way
+to be constituted. I should be passing a very--or a rather--inhuman
+little Xmas if the youngest of my nephews (William's _minore_--aged
+18--hadn't come to me from the tutor's at Oxford with whom he is a
+little woefully coaching. But he is a dear young presence and worthy of
+the rest of the brood, and I've just packed him off to the little Rye
+annual subscription ball of New Year's Eve--at the old Monastery--with a
+part of the "county" doubtless coming in to keep up the tradition--under
+the sternest injunction as to his not coming back to me "engaged" to a
+quadragenarian hack or a military widow--the mature women being here the
+greatest dancers.--You tell me of your "Roman book," but you don't tell
+me you've sent it me, and I very earnestly wish you _would_--though not
+without suiting the action to the word. And _anything_ you put forth
+anywhere or anyhow that looks my way in the least, I should be tenderly
+grateful for.... I should like immensely to come over to you
+again--really like it and for uses still (!!) to be possible. But it's
+practically, materially, physically impossible. Too late--too late! The
+long years have betrayed me--but I am none the less constantly yours
+all,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edward Lee Childe._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+[Jan. 8, 1909.]
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear old Friend,
+*/
+
+Please don't take my slight delay in thanking you for your last
+remembrance as representing any limit to the degree in which it touches
+me. You are faithful and _courtois_ and gallant, in this unceremonious
+age, to the point of the exemplary and the authoritative--in the sense
+that _vous y faites autorite_, and only the multitudinous waves of the
+Christmastide and the New Year's high tide, as all that matter lets
+itself loose in this country, have kept me from landing
+(correspondentially speaking) straight at your door. I like to know that
+you so admirably keep up your tone and your temper, and even your
+interest, and perhaps even as much your general faith (as I try for that
+matter to do myself), in spite of disconcerting years and discouraging
+sensations--once in a way perhaps; in spite, briefly, of earthquakes and
+newspapers and motor-cars and aeroplanes. I myself, frankly, have lost
+the desire to live in a situation (by which I mean in a world) in which
+I can be invaded from so many sides at once. I go in fear, I sit
+exposed, and when the German Emperor carries the next war (hideous
+thought) into this country, my chimney-pots, visible to a certain
+distance out at sea, may be his very first objective. You may say that
+that is just a good reason for my coming to Paris again all promptly and
+before he arrives--and indeed reasons for coming to Paris, as for doing
+any other luxurious or licentious thing, never fail me: the drawback is
+that they are all of the sophisticating sort against which I have much
+to brace myself. If you were to see _from_ what you summon me, it would
+be brought home to you that a small rude Sussex burgher _must_ feel the
+strain of your Parisian high pitch, haute elegance, general glittering
+life and conversation; the strain of keeping up with it all and mingling
+in the fray....
+
+Let me thank you, further, for indicating to me the new volumes by the
+Duchesse de Dino--what a wealth of such _stored_ treasures does the
+French world still, at this time of day, produce--when one would suppose
+the sack had been again and again emptied. The Literary Supplement of
+this week's _Times_ has a sympathetic review of the book--which I shall
+send for by reason of the Duchess and the English reminiscences, and
+not for any sake of Talleyrand, who always affects me as a repulsive
+figure, such as I couldn't have borne to be in the same room with. I
+should have asked you, had I lately had a preliminary chance, for a word
+of news of Paul Harvey and whether he is actually or still in Egypt....
+I wish Madame Marie all peace and plenty for the coming year--though I
+am not sure I envy her Lausanne in January. But I am yours and hers all
+faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Hugh Walpole._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+March 28th, 1909.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Hugh,
+*/
+
+I have had so bad a conscience on your score, ever since last writing to
+you with that as yet unredeemed promise of my poor image or effigy, that
+the benignity of your expressions has but touched me the more. On coming
+to look up some decent photograph among the few odds and ends of such
+matters to be here brought out of hiding, I found nothing that wasn't
+hateful to me to put into circulation. I have been very little and very
+ill (_always_ very ill) represented--and not at all for a long time, and
+shall never be again; and of the two or three disinherited illustrations
+of that truth that I have put away for you to choose between you must
+come here and make selection, yourself carrying them off. My reluctant
+hand can't bring itself to "send" them. Heaven forbid such sendings!
+
+Can you come some day--some Saturday--in April?--I mean after Easter.
+Bethink yourself, and let it be the 17th or the 24th if possible. (I
+expect to go up to town for four or five weeks the 1st May.) You are
+keeping clearly such a glorious holiday now that I fear you may hate to
+begin again; but you'll have with me in every way much shorter commons,
+much sterner fare, much less purple and fine linen, and in short a much
+more constant reminder of your mortality than while you loll in A. C.
+B.'s chariot of fire. Therefore, as I say, come grimly down. Loll none
+the less, however, meanwhile, to your utmost--such opportunities, I
+recognise, are to be fondly cherished. If you give A. C. B. this news of
+me, please assure him with my love that I am infinitely, that I am
+yearningly aware of _that_. He'd see soon enough if he were some day to
+let _me_ loll. However I am going to Cambridge for some as yet
+undetermined 48 hours in May, and if he will let me loll for one of
+those hours at Magdalene it will do almost as well--I mean of course he
+being there. However, even if he does flee at my approach--and the
+possession of a fleeing-machine _must_ enormously prompt that sort of
+thing--I rejoice immensely meanwhile that you have the kindness of him;
+I am magnanimous enough for that. Likewise I am tender-hearted enough to
+be capable of shedding tears of pity and sympathy over young Hugh on the
+threshold of fictive art--and with the long and awful vista of large
+production in a largely producing world before him. Ah, dear young Hugh,
+it will be very grim for you with your faithful and dismal friend,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+April 19th, 1909.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Edith,
+*/
+
+I thank you very kindly for your so humane and so interesting letter,
+even if I must thank you a little briefly--having but this afternoon got
+out of bed, to which the Doctor three days ago consigned me--for a
+menace of jaundice, which appears however to have been, thank heaven,
+averted! (I once had it, and _basta cosi_;) so that I am a little shaky
+and infirm. You give me a sense of endless things that I yearn to know
+more of, and I clutch hard the hope that you will indeed come to England
+in June. I have had--to be frank--a bad and worried and depressed and
+inconvenient winter--with the serpent-trail of what seemed at the
+time--the time you kindly offered me a princely hospitality--a tolerably
+ominous cardiac crisis--as to which I have since, however, got
+considerable information and reassurance--from the man in London most
+completely master of the subject--that is of the whole mystery of
+heart-troubles. I am definitely better of that condition of
+December-January, and really believe I shall be better yet; only that
+particular brush of the dark wing leaves one never quite the same--and I
+have not, I confess (with amelioration, even,) been lately very famous;
+(which I shouldn't mention, none the less, were it not that I really
+believe myself, for definite reasons, and intelligent ones, on the way
+to a much more complete emergence--both from the above mentioned and
+from other worries.) So much mainly to explain to you my singularly
+unsympathetic silence during a period of anxiety and discomfort on your
+own part which I all the while feared to be not small--but which I now
+see, with all affectionate participation, to have been extreme.... Sit
+loose and live in the day--don't borrow trouble, and remember that
+nothing happens as we forecast it--but always with interesting and, as
+it were, refreshing differences. "Tired" you must be, even you, indeed;
+and Paris, as I look at it from here, figures to me a great blur of
+intense white light in which, attached to the hub of a revolving wheel,
+you are all whirled round by the finest silver strings. "Mazes of heat
+and sound" envelop you to my wincing vision--given over as I am to a
+craven worship (_only_ henceforth) of peace at any price. This dusky
+village, all deadening grey and damp (muffling) green, meets more and
+more my supreme appreciation of stillness--and here, in June, you must
+come and find me--to let me emphasize that--appreciation!--still
+further. You'll rest with me here then, but don't wait for that to rest
+somehow--somewhere en attendant. I am afraid you won't rest much in a
+retreat on the Place de la Concorde. However, so does a poor old
+croaking barnyard fowl advise a golden eagle!...
+
+I am, dearest Edith, all constantly and tenderly yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Arthur Christopher Benson._
+
+
+/*
+Queen's Acre, Windsor.
+June 5th, 1909.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Arthur,
+*/
+
+Howard S. has given me so kind a message from you that it is like the
+famous coals of fire on my erring head--renewing my rueful sense of
+having suffered these last days to prolong the too graceless silence
+that I have, in your direction, been constantly intending and constantly
+failing to break. It isn't only that I owe you a letter, but that I have
+exceedingly wanted to write it--ever since I began (too many weeks ago)
+to feel the value of the gift that you lately made me in the form of the
+acquaintance of delightful and interesting young Hugh Walpole. He has
+been down to see me in the country, and I have had renewed opportunities
+of him in town--the result of which is that, touched as I am with his
+beautiful candour of appreciation of my "feeble efforts," etc., I feel
+for him the tenderest sympathy and an absolute affection. I am in
+general almost--or very often--sorry for the intensely young, intensely
+confident and intensely ingenuous and generous--but I somehow don't pity
+_him_, for I think he has some gift to conciliate the Fates. I feel him
+at any rate an admirable young friend, of the openest mind and most
+attaching nature, and anything I can ever do to help or enlighten, to
+guard or guide or comfort him, I shall do with particular satisfaction,
+and with a lively sense of being indebted to you for the interesting
+occasion of it. Of these last circumstances please be very sure.
+
+I go to Cambridge next Friday, for almost the first time in my life--to
+see a party of three friends whom I am in the singular position of never
+having seen in my life (I shall be for two or three days with Charles
+Sayle, 8 Trumpington Street,) and I confess to a hope of finding you
+there (if so be it you _can_ by chance be;) though if you flee before
+the turmoil of the days in question, when everything, I am told, is at
+concert pitch, I won't insist that I shan't have understood it. If you
+are, at any rate, at Magdalene I should like very much to knock at your
+door, and see you face to face for half-an-hour; if that may be
+possible. And I won't conceal from you that I should like to see your
+College and your abode and your _genre de vie_--even though your
+countenance most of all. If you are not, in a manner, well, as Howard
+hints to me, I shan't (perhaps I _can't_!) make you any worse--and I may
+make you a little better. Meditate on that, and do, in the connection,
+what you can for me. Boldly, at any rate, shall I knock; and if you are
+absent I shall yearn over the sight of your ancient walls.
+
+I am spending a dark, cold, dripping Sunday here--with two or three
+other amis de la maison; but above all with the ghosts, somehow, of a
+promiscuous past brushing me as with troubled wings, and the echoes of
+the ancient years seeming to murmur to me: "Don't you wish you were
+still young--or young again--even as _they_ so wonderfully are?" (my
+fellow-visitors and inexhaustibly soft-hearted host.) I don't know that
+I particularly do wish it--but the melancholy voices (I mean the
+_inaudible_ ones of the loquacious saloon) have thus driven me to a
+rather cold room (my own) of refuge, to invoke thus scratchily _your_
+fine friendly attention and to reassure you of the constant sympathy and
+fidelity of yours, my dear Arthur, all gratefully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Charles Sayle._
+
+/#
+ For several years past H. J. had received a New Year greeting from
+ three friends at Cambridge--Mr. Charles Sayle, Mr. A. T.
+ Bartholomew, Mr. Geoffrey Keynes--none of whom he had met till he
+ went up to Cambridge this month to stay with Mr. Sayle during
+ May-week. It was on this occasion that he first met Rupert Brooke.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
+June 16th, 1909.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Charles Sayle,
+*/
+
+I want to send you back a grateful--and graceful--greeting--and to let
+you all know that the more I think over your charming hospitality and
+friendly labour and (so to speak) loyal service, the more I feel touched
+and convinced. My three days with you will become for me a very precious
+little treasure of memory--they are in fact already taking their place,
+in that character, in a beautiful little innermost niche, where they
+glow in a golden and rose-coloured light. I have come back to sterner
+things; you did nothing but beguile and waylay--making me loll, not
+only figuratively, but literally (so unforgettably--all that wondrous
+Monday morning), on perfect surfaces exactly adapted to my figure. For
+their share in these generous yet so subtle arts please convey again my
+thanks to all concerned--and in particular to the gentle Geoffrey and
+the admirable Theodore, with a definite stretch toward the insidious
+Rupert--with whose name I take this liberty because I don't know whether
+one loves one's love with a (surname terminal) _e_ or not. Please take
+it from me, all, that I shall live but to testify to you further, and in
+some more effective way than this--my desire for which is as a long rich
+vista that can only be compared to that adorable great perspective of
+St. John's Gallery as we saw it on Saturday afternoon. Peace then be
+with you--I hope it came promptly after the last strain and stress and
+all the rude porterage (_so_ appreciated!) to which I subjected you.
+I'll fetch and carry, in some fashion or other, for _you_ yet, and am
+ever so faithfully yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+P.S. Just a momentary drop to meaner things--to say that I appear to
+have left in my room a _sleeping-suit_ (blue and white pyjamas--jacket
+and trousers,) which, in the hurry of my departure and my eagerness to
+rejoin you a little in the garden before tearing myself away, I probably
+left folded away under my pillows. If your brave Housekeeper (who evaded
+my look about for her at the last) will very kindly make of them such a
+little packet as may safely reach me here by parcels' post she will
+greatly oblige yours again (and hers),
+
+/*
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. W.K. Clifford_.
+
+/#
+ The two plays on which H.J. was at work were _The Other House_
+ (written many years before and now revised) and _The Outcry_.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+July 19th, 1909.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Lucy C!
+*/
+
+I have been a prey to agitations and complications, many assaults,
+invasions and inconveniences, since leaving town--whereby I have had to
+put off thanking you for two brilliant letters. And yet I have wanted to
+write--to tell you (explaining) how I found myself swallowed up by one
+social abyss after another, and tangled in a succession of artful
+feminine webs, at Stafford House that evening, so that I couldn't get
+into touch with you, or with Ethel, again, before you were gone, as I
+found when I finally made a dash for you. That too was very complicated,
+and evening-parties bristle with dangers.... The very critical business
+of the _final_ luminous copy is, how ever, coming to an end--I mean the
+arriving at the utterly last intense reductions and compressions. So
+much has to come out, however, that I am sickened and appalled--and this
+sacrifice of the very life-blood of one's play, the mere vulgar anatomy
+and bare-bones poverty to which one has to squeeze it more and more, is
+the nauseating side of the whole desperate job. In spite of which I am
+interesting myself deeply in the three act comedy I have undertaken for
+Frohman--and which I find ferociously difficult--but with a difficulty
+that, thank God, draws me on and fascinates. If I can go on _believing
+in_ my subject I can go on treating it; but sometimes I have a mortal
+chill and wonder if I ain't damnably deluded. However, the balance
+inclines to faith and I _think_ it works out. You shall hear what comes
+of it--even at the worst. Meanwhile for yourself, dearest Lucy, buck up
+and patiently woo the Muse. She responds at last always to true and
+faithful wooing--to the right artful patience--and turns upon one the
+smile from which light breaks. I have been reading over the Long Duel
+(which I immediately return)--with a sense of its having great charm and
+care of execution, and quality and grace, but also, dear Lucy, of its
+drawbacks for practical prosperity. The greatest of these seems to me to
+be fundamental--to reside in the fact that the subject isn't dramatic,
+that it deals with a _state_, a position, a situation (of the "static"
+kind), and not, save in a very minor degree, with an action, a
+progression; which fact, highly favourable to it for a tale, a
+psychologic picture, is detrimental to its _tenseness_--to its being
+matter for a play and developed into 4 acts. A play appears to me of
+necessity to involve a struggle, a question (of whether, and how, will
+it or won't it happen? and if so, or not so, how and why?--which we have
+the suspense, the curiosity, the anxiety, the _tension_, in a word, of
+seeing; and which means that the whole thing shows an attack upon
+_oppositions_--with the victory or the failure on one side or the other,
+and each wavering and shifting, from point to point.) But your hero is
+thus not an _agent_, he is passive, he doesn't take the field. I say all
+this because I think there is light on the matter of the history of the
+fate of the play in it--and also think that there are other elements of
+disadvantage for the piece too. The elderly (or almost?) French artist
+with a virtuous love-sorrow doesn't, for the B.P., belong to the
+_actual_; he's romantic, and old-fashionedly romantic, and remote; and
+the case is aggravated by the corresponding maturity of the heroine. You
+will say that there is the young couple, and what comes of their being
+there, and _their_ "action"; but the truth about that, I fear, is that
+innocent young lovers _as such_, and not as being engaged in other
+difficulties and with other oppositions (_of their own_,) have
+practically ceased to be a dramatic value--aren't any longer an element
+or an interest to conjure with. Don't hate me for saying these
+things--for working them out critically, and so far as may be,
+illuminatingly, in face of the difficulty the L.D. seems to have had in
+getting itself brought out. We are dealing with an art prodigiously
+difficult and arduous every way--and in which one seems most of all to
+sink into a Sea of colossal Waste. I'm not sure that _The Other House_,
+after all my not-to-be-reckoned labour and calculation on it, isn't (to
+be) wasted. But these are dreary words--it is much past midnight. I _am_
+damned critical--for it's the only thing to be, and all else is damned
+humbug. But I don't mean a douche of cold water, and am ever so tenderly
+and faithfully yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Grace Norton_.
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+August 10th, 1909.
+*/
+
+....I break ground with you thus, dear Grace, late in the evening (too
+late--for I shall soon have to go _most_ belatedly to bed) of a
+singularly beautiful and glowingly hot summer's day--one of a succession
+that August has at last brought us (and with more, apparently, in
+store,) after a wholly damnable June and July, a hideous ordeal of wet
+and cold. English fine weather is worth waiting for--it is so sovereign
+in quality when it comes, and the capacity of this little place of a few
+marked odd elements to become charming, to shine and flush and endear
+itself, is then so admirable. I went out for my afternoon walk under
+stress of having promised my good little gardener (a real pearl of
+price--these eleven years--in the way of a serving-man) to come and
+witness his possible triumphs at our annual little horticultural show,
+given this year in some charming private grounds on a high hill
+overlooking our little huddled (and lower-hilled) purple town. There I
+found myself in the extraordinary position--save that other summers
+might--but haven't--softened the edge of the monstrosity--of seeing
+"Henry James Esq." figure on _thirteen_ large cards commemorative of
+first, second and third prizes--and of more first, even, if you can
+believe it, than the others. It always [seems] to point, more than
+anything else, the moral, for me, of my long expatriation and to put its
+"advantages" into a nutshell. In what corner of our native immensity
+could I have fallen--and practically without effort, helpless ignoramus
+though I be--into the uncanny flourish of a swell at local flower shows?
+Here it has come of itself--and it crowns my career. How I wish you
+weren't too far away for me to send you a box of my victorious
+carnations and my triumphant sweet peas! However, I remember your
+telling me with emphasis long years ago that you hated "cut flowers,"
+and I have treasured your brave heresy (the memory of it) so
+ineffaceably so as to find support in it always, and fine precedent, for
+a very lukewarm adhesion to them myself, except for a slight
+inconsistency in the matter of roses and sweet peas (both supremely
+lovable, I think, in their kind,) which increase and multiply and bless
+one in proportion as one tears them from the stem. However, it's 1.30
+a.m. o'clock--and I am putting this to bed; till to-morrow night again,
+when I shall pull it forth and add to its yearning volume. I _have_ to
+write at night, and even late at night--to write letter-things at all;
+for the simple reason of being so vilely constituted for work that when
+my regularly recurring morning stint is done (from after breakfast to
+luncheon-time,) I am "done" utterly, and so cerebrally spent (with the
+effort to distil "quality" for three or four hours,) that I can't touch
+a pen till as much as possible of the day has elapsed, to build out and
+disconnect my morning's association with it. That is one reason--and
+always has been--of my baseness as a correspondent. The question is
+whether the effect I produce as a "story writer" is of a nature to make
+up for it. You will say "most certainly not!"--and who shall blame you?
+But goodnight and a demain.
+
+_August 11th._ I don't mean this to be a diary--but it has been another
+splendid summer day--and I am wondering if you sit in the loose but warm
+embrace of bowery Cambridge. Every now and then I read in the Times of
+"92 deg. in the shade in America," and Cambridge is so intensely your
+America that I ask myself--though my imagination breaks down in the
+effort to place you anywhere, even as I write again, by my late ticking
+clock, in this hot stillness, [but] in the vine-tangled porch where I
+sat so often anciently, but only a little, alas, that other more often
+and more variously hindered year. It has been _almost_ 92 deg. in the shade,
+or has almost felt like it here to-day; in spite of which I took--and
+enjoyed--a long slow walk over the turf by our tidal "channel" here
+(which goes straight forth to _the_ channel, and over to France, at the
+end of a mile or two, and has a beautiful colour at the flow.) ... I'm
+spending a very quiet summer, to which the complete absence of any
+visiting or sojourning relative (a frequent and prized feature with me
+most other years) gives a rather melancholy blankness. But I'm hoping
+for a nephew or two--William's Bill, that is, next month; and meanwhile
+the season melts in my grasp and ebbs with an appalling rush (don't you
+find, at our age?), for there are still things I want to _do_, and I ask
+myself, at such a rate, How? I lately, as I think I've mentioned, spent
+a couple of months in London, and saw as much as I could of Sally and
+Lily, whom I found most agreeable, and _confirmed_ in their respective
+types of charm and character. Lily is still in England--and of course
+you know all about her--I hope to have her with me here before long for
+a couple of days. But there is nothing I more wonder at, dear Grace,
+than the question of what Cambridge has become to you, or seems to you,
+without (practically) a Shady Hill, after the long years. It must be,
+altogether, much of a changed world--and thus, afar off, I wonder. It is
+a way of getting again into communication with you, or at any rate of
+making you a poor wild and wandering sign, as over broken and scarce
+_sounding_ wires, of the perfect affectionate fidelity of your firm old
+friend, my dear Grace, of all and all the wonderful years,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To William James._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+Aug. 17th, 1909.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest William,
+*/
+
+I respond without delay to the blessing of your letter of the 6th--which
+gives me so general a good impression of you all that I must somehow
+celebrate it. I like to think of your tranquil--if the word be the least
+applicable!--Chocorua summer; and as the time of year comes round again
+of my sole poor visit there (my mere fortnight from September 1st 1904),
+the yearning but baffled thought of being with you on that woodland
+scene and at the same season once more tugs at my sensibilities and is
+almost too much for me. I have the sense of my then leaving it all
+unsated, after a beggarly snatch only, and of how I might have done with
+so much more of it. But I shall pretty evidently have to do with what I
+got. The very smell and sentiment of the American summer's end there and
+of Alice's beautiful "rustic" hospitality of overflowing milk and honey,
+to say nothing of squash pie and ice-cream in heroic proportions, all
+mingle for me with the assault of forest and lake and of those delicious
+orchardy, yet rocky vaguenesses and Arcadian "nowheres," which are the
+note of what is sweetest and most attaching in the dear old American, or
+particularly New England, scenery. It comes back to me as with such a
+magnificent beckoning looseness--in relieving contrast to the consummate
+tightness (a part, too, oddly, of the very wealth of effect) _du pays
+d'ici_. It isn't however, luckily, that I have really turned "agin" my
+landscape portion here, for never so much as this summer, e.g., have I
+felt the immensely noble, the truly aristocratic, beauty of this
+splendid county of Sussex, especially as the winged car of offence has
+monstrously unfolded it to me. This afternoon an amiable neighbour, Mrs.
+Richard Hennessy, motored me over to Hurstmonceux Castle, which, in
+spite of its being but about ten miles "back of" Hastings, and not more
+than twenty from here, I had never yet seen. It's a prodigious romantic
+ruin, in an adorable old ruined park; but the splendour of the views and
+horizons, and of the rich composition and perpetual picture and
+inexhaustible detail of the country, had never more come home to me. I
+don't do such things, however, every day, thank goodness, and am having
+the very quietest summer, I think, that has melted away for me (how they
+do melt!) since I came to live here. I miss the tie of consanguinity--that
+I have so often felt!--and now (especially since your letter, for you
+mention his other plans) I find myself calling on the hoped-for Bill in
+vain. We lately have had (it broke but yesterday) a splendid heated
+term--very highly heated--following on a wholly detestable June and July
+and having lasted without a lapse the whole month up to now--which has
+been admirable and enjoyable and of a renewed consecration to this dear
+little old garden. I hope it hasn't broken for good, as complications,
+of sorts, loom for me next month--but the high possibility is that we
+shall still have earned, and have suffered for in advance, a fine
+August-end and September. My window is open wide even now--but to the
+blustering, softly-storming, south-windy midnight. And through thick and
+thin I have been very quietly and successfully working. It all pans out,
+I think, in a very promising way, but it is too "important" for me to
+chatter about save on the proved, or proveable, basis that now seems
+rather largely to await it. And I grow, I think, small step by small
+step, physically easier and easier, and seem to know, pretty steadily,
+more and more where I am.... I have been following you and Alice in
+imagination to the kind and beautiful Intervale hospitality--my charming
+taste of which has remained with me ever so gratefully and uneffacedly,
+please tell the Merrimans when you have another chance. You tell me that
+Alice and Harry lift all practical burdens from your genius--than which
+they surely couldn't have a nobler or a more inspiring task;--but what a
+fate and a fortune yours too--to have an Alice reinforced by a Harry,
+and a Harry multiplied by an Alice! L'un vaut l'autre--as they appear to
+me in the wondrous harmony. You don't mention Harry's getting to you at
+all--but my mind recoils with horror from the thought that he is not in
+these days getting somewhere. It's a blow to me to learn that Bill is
+again to hibernate in Boston--but softened by what you so delightfully
+tell me of your portrait and of the nature and degree of his progress.
+If he can do much and get on so there, why right he is of course to
+stay--and most interesting is it to learn that he can do so much; I wish
+I could see something--and can't your portrait be photographed? But I
+lately wrote to him appealingly; and he will explain to me all things.
+Admirable your evocation of the brave and brown and beautiful Peg--of
+whom I wish I weren't so howlingly deprived. But please tell her I
+drench her with her old uncle's proudest and fondest affection. I hang
+tenderly over Aleck--while _he_, poor boy, hangs so toughly over God
+knows what--and fervently do I pray for him. And you and Alice I
+embrace.
+
+/*
+Ever your HENRY.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To H. G. Wells._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+October 14th, 1909.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Wells,
+*/
+
+I took down Ann Veronica in deep rich draughts during the two days
+following your magnanimous "donation" of her, and yet have waited till
+now to vibrate to you visibly and audibly under that pressed spring. I
+never vibrated under anything of yours, on the whole, I think, _more_
+than during that intense inglutition; but if I have been hanging fire of
+acclamation and comments, as I hung it, to my complete self-stultification
+and beyond recovery, over Tono-Bungay, it is simply because, confound
+you, there is so much too much to say, _always_, after everything of
+yours; and the critical principle so rages within me (by which I mean
+the appreciative, the _real_ gustatory,) that I tend to labour under the
+superstition that one must always say _all_. But I can't do that, and I
+won't--so that I almost intelligently and coherently choose, which
+simplifies a little the question. And nothing matters after the fact
+that you are to me so much the most interesting representational and
+ironic genius and faculty, of our Anglo-Saxon world and life, in these
+bemuddled days, that you stand out intensely vivid and alone, making
+nobody else signify at all. And this has never been more the case than
+in A.V., where your force and life and ferocious sensibility and heroic
+cheek all take effect in an extraordinary wealth and truth and beauty
+and _fury_ of impressionism. The quantity of things _done_, in your
+whole picture, excites my liveliest admiration--so much so that I was
+able to let myself go, responsively and assentingly, under the strength
+of the feeling communicated and the impetus accepted, almost as much as
+if your "method," and fifty other things--by which I mean sharp
+questions coming up--left me _only_ passive and convinced, unchallenging
+and uninquiring (which they _don't_--no, they don't!) I don't think, as
+regards this latter point, that I can make out what your subject or
+Idea, the prime determinant one, may be detected as having _been_
+(lucidity and logic, on that score, not, to my sense, reigning supreme.)
+But there I am as if I were wanting to say "all"!--which I'm not now, I
+find, a bit. I only want to say that the thing is irresistible (or
+indescribable) in its subjective assurance and its rare objective
+vividness and colour. You must at moments make dear old Dickens
+turn--for envy of the eye and the ear and the nose and the mouth of
+you--in his grave. I don't think the girl herself--her projected
+Ego--the best thing in the book--I think it rather wants clearness and
+_nuances_. But the _men_ are prodigious, all, and the total result lives
+and kicks and throbs and flushes and glares--I mean hangs there in the
+very air we breathe, and that you are a very swagger performer indeed
+and that I am your very gaping and grateful
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Henrietta Reubell_.
+
+/#
+ _Crapy Cornelia_, embodiment of the New York of H.J.'s youth, will
+ be remembered as one of the stories in _The Finer Grain_.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+Oct. 19, 1909.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Etta Reubell--my very old friend indeed!
+*/
+
+Your letter charms and touches me, and I rejoice you were moved to write
+it. You have _understood_ "Crapy Cornelia"--and people so very often
+seem not to understand--that that alone gives me pleasure. But when you
+tell me also of my now _living_, really, in green and gold, in the dear
+little old Petit Salon and almost resting on the beloved red velvet sofa
+on which--in other days--I so often myself have rested, and which
+figures to me as the basis or background of a hundred delightful hours,
+the tears quite rise to my eyes and I have a sense of _success in life_
+that few other things have ever given me. I have not had a very good
+year--a baddish crisis about a twelvemonth ago; but I have gradually
+worked out of it and the prospect ahead is fairer. I really think I
+shall even be able to come and see you, and sit on the immemorial sofa,
+and see my kind and serried shelves play their part in your musee and
+figure as a class by Themselves among your relics--and to have that
+emotion I am capable of a great effort. I have great occasional
+_bouffees_ of fond memory and longing from our dear old _past_ Paris. It
+affects me as rather ghosty; but life becomes more and more that, and I
+have learnt to live with my pale spectres more than with my ruddy
+respirers. They will sit thick on the old red sofa. But with you the
+shepherdess of the flock it will be all right. You are not Cornelia, but
+I am much White-Mason, and I shall again sit by your fire.
+
+/*
+Your tout-devoue
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To William James_.
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+October 31st, 1909.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest William,
+*/
+
+I have beautiful communications from you all too long unacknowledged and
+unrequited--though I shall speak for the present but of the two most
+prized letters from you (from Cambridge and Chocorua respectively--not
+counting quaint sequels from Franconia, "autumn-tint" post-cards etc., a
+few days ago, or thereabouts, and leaving aside altogether, but only for
+later fond treatment, please assure them, an admirable one from Harry
+and an exquisite one from Bill.) To these I add the arrival, still more
+recently, of your brave new book, which I fell upon immediately and have
+quite passionately absorbed--to within 50 pages of the end; a great
+number previous to which I have read this evening--which makes me late
+to begin this. I find it of thrilling interest, triumphant and
+brilliant, and am lost in admiration of your wealth and power. I
+palpitate as you make out your case (since it seems to me you so utterly
+do,) as I under no romantic spell ever palpitate now; and into that case
+I enter intensely, unreservedly, and I think you would allow almost
+intelligently. I find you nowhere as difficult as you surely make
+everything for your critics. Clearly you are winning a great battle and
+great will be your fame. Your letters seem to me to reflect a happy and
+easy summer achieved--and I recognise in them with rapture, and I trust
+not fallaciously, a comparative immunity from the horrid human _incubi_,
+the awful "people" fallacy, of the past, and your ruinous sacrifices to
+that bloody Moloch. May this luminous exemption but grow and grow! and
+with it your personal and physical peace and sufficiency, your
+profitable possession of yourself. Amen, amen--over which I hope dear
+Alice hasn't _lieu_ to smile!...
+
+_November 1st._ I broke this off last night and went to bed--and now add
+a few remarks after a grey soft windless and miraculously rainless day
+(under a most rainful sky,) which has had rather a sad hole made in it
+by a visitation from a young person from New York ... [who] stole from
+me the hour or two before my small evening feed in which I hoped to
+finish "The Meaning of Truth"; but I have done much toward this since
+that repast, and with a renewed eagerness of inglutition. You surely
+make philosophy more interesting and living than anyone has ever made it
+before, and by a real creative and undemolishable making; whereby all
+you write plays into _my_ poor "creative" consciousness and artistic
+vision and pretension with the most extraordinary suggestiveness and
+force of application and inspiration. Thank the powers--that is thank
+_yours_!--for a relevant and assimilable and referable philosophy, which
+is related to the rest of one's intellectual life otherwise and more
+conveniently than a fowl is related to a fish. In short, dearest
+William, the effect of these collected papers of your present
+volume--which I had read all individually before--seems to me
+exquisitely and adorably cumulative and, so to speak, consecrating; so
+that I, for my part feel Pragmatic invulnerability constituted. Much
+will this _suffrage_ help the cause!--Not less inspiring to me, for
+that matter, is the account you give, in your beautiful letter of
+October 6th, from Chocorua, of Alice and the offspring, Bill and Peggot
+in particular, confirming so richly all my previous observation of the
+Son and letting in such rich further lights upon the Daughter.... I mean
+truly to write her straight and supplicate her for a letter....
+
+...But good-night again--as my thoughts flutter despairingly (of
+attainment) toward your farawayness, under the hope that the Cambridge
+autumn is handsome and wholesome about you. I yearn over Alice to the
+point of wondering if some day before Xmas she may find a scrap of a
+moment to testify to me a little about the situation with her now too
+unfamiliar pen. Oh if you only _can_ next summer come out for two years!
+This home shall be your fortress and temple and headquarters as never,
+never, even, before. I embrace you all--I send my express love to Mrs.
+Gibbens--and am your fondest of brothers,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+[December 13th, 1909.]
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Edith,
+*/
+
+I'm horribly in arrears with you and it hideously looks as if I hadn't
+deeply revelled and rioted in your beautiful German letter in
+particular--which thrilled me to the core. You are indeed my ideal of
+the dashing woman, and you never dashed more felicitously or fruitfully,
+for my imagination, than when you dashed, at that particular psychologic
+moment, off to dear old rococo Munich of the "Initials" (of my tender
+youth,) and again of my far-away 30th year. (I've never been there
+depuis.) Vivid and charming and sympathetic _au possible_ your image and
+echo of it all; only making me gnash my teeth that I wasn't with you, or
+that at least I can't ply you, face to face, with more questions even
+than your letter delightfully anticipates. It came to me during a
+fortnight spent in London--and all letters that reach me there, when I'm
+merely on the branch, succeed in getting themselves treasured up for
+better attention after I'm back here. But the real difficulty in meeting
+your gorgeous revelations as they deserve is that of breaking out in
+sympathy and curiosity at points enough--and leaping with you breathless
+from Schiller to Tiepolo--through all the Gothicry of Augsburg,
+Wuerzburg, und so weiter. I want the rest, none the less--_all_ the rest,
+after Augsburg and the Weinhandlung, and above all how it looks to you
+from Paris (if not Paradise) regained again--in respect to which gaping
+contrast I am immensely interested in your superlative commendation of
+the ensemble and well-doneness of the second play at Munich (though it
+is at _Cabale und Liebe_ that I ache and groan to the core for not
+having been with you.) It is curious how a strange deep-buried Teutonism
+in one (without detriment to the tropical forest of surface, and
+half-way-down, Latinism) stirs again at moments under stray Germanic
+_souffles_ and makes one so far from being sorry to be akin to the race
+of Goethe and Heine and Duerer and _their_ kinship. At any rate I rejoice
+that you had your plunge--which (the whole pride and pomp of which)
+makes me sit here with the feeling of a mere aged British pauper in a
+workhouse. However, of course I shan't get real thrilling and throbbing
+items and illustrations till I have them from your lips: to which remote
+and precarious possibility I must resign myself.... And now I am back
+here for--I hope--many weeks to come; having a morbid taste for some,
+even most--though not all--of the midwinter conditions of this place.
+Turkeys and mince pies are being accumulated for Xmas, as well as
+calendars, penwipers, and formidable lists of persons to whom tips will
+be owing; a fine old Yuletide observance in general, quoi!... But good
+night--tanti saluti affetuosi.
+
+/*
+Ever your
+
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Madame Wagniere._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+Dec. 22nd, 1909.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Laura Wagniere,
+*/
+
+The general turmoil of the year's end has done its best to prevent my
+sooner expressing to you my great rejoicing in all the pleasantness of
+your news of your settled state by the "plus beau des lacs"; a
+consummation on which I heartily congratulate you both. A real rest, for
+the soles of one's feet, a receptacle and domestic temple for one's
+battered possessions, is what I myself found, better than I had ever
+found it before, some dozen years ago in _this_ decent nook, and I feel
+I can only wish you to even get half as much good of it as I have got of
+my small impregnable stronghold--or better still, incorruptible
+hermitage. Yours isn't a hermitage of course, since hermits don't--in
+spite of St. Anthony and his famous complications (or rather and
+doubtless by reason of them)--have wives or female friends: and _very_
+holy women don't even have husbands.
+
+But it's evidently a delightful place, on which I cast my benediction
+and which I shall rejoice some day to see, so that you must let me
+tenderly nourish the hope. I have always had, and from far back, my
+_premiere jeunesse_, a great sentiment for all your Vaudois lake shore.
+I remember perfectly your Tour de Peilz neighbourhood, and at the
+thought of all the beauty and benignity that crowds your picture I envy
+you as much as I applaud. If I did not live in this country and in this
+possibility of contact with London, for which I have many reasons, I
+think I too would fix myself in Switzerland, and in your conveniently
+cosmopolite part of it, where you are in the very centre of Europe and
+of a whole circle of easy communications and excursions. I was immensely
+struck with the way the Simplon tunnel makes a deliciously near thing of
+Italy (the last and first time I came through it a couple of years ago;)
+and when I remember how when I left Milan well after luncheon, I was at
+my hotel at Lausanne at 10.30 or so, your position becomes quite ideal,
+granting the proposition that one doesn't (any longer) so much want to
+live in that unspeakable country as to feel whenever one will, well on
+the way to it. And you are on the way to so many other of the
+interesting countries, the roads to which all radiate from you as the
+spokes from the hub of a wheel--which remarks, however, you will have
+all been furiously making to yourselves; "all" I say, because I suppose
+Marguerite is now with you, and I don't suppose that even she wants to
+be always on the way to Boston only.
+
+I hope you are having _la-bas_ a less odious year than we _poverini_,
+who only see it go on from bad to worse, the deluge _en permanence_,
+with mud up to our necks and a consequent confinement to the house that
+is like an interminable stormy sea voyage under closed hatches. I have
+now spent some ten or eleven winters mainly in the country and find
+myself reacting violently at last in favour of pavements or street lamps
+and lighted shop fronts--places where one can go out at 4 or at 5 or at
+6, if the deluge has been "on" the hour before and has mercifully
+abated. Here at 5 or 6 the plunge is only into black darkness and the
+abysmal _crotte_ aforesaid. I don't say this to discourage you, for I am
+sure you have shop-fronts and pavements and tramcars highly convenient,
+and also without detriment to the charming-looking house of which you
+send me the likeness. It is evidently a most sympathetic spot, and I
+shall positively try, on some propitious occasion, to knock at its door.
+I envy you the drop into Italy that you will have by this time made, or
+come back from, after meeting your daughter. I send _her_ my kindest
+remembrance and the same to her father.
+
+I catch the distracted post (_so_ distracted and distracting at this
+British Xmas-tide) and am, dear Laura Wagniere, your affectionate old
+friend,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+Dec. 22, 1909.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Thomas,
+*/
+
+As usual my silence has become so dense and coagulated that you might
+cut monstrous slabs and slices off it for distribution in your
+family--were you "maliciously" disposed! But my whole security--as my
+whole decency (so far as claim to decency for myself goes)--is that we
+are neither of us malicious, and that I have often enough shown you
+before that, deep as I may seem to plunge into the obscure, there ever
+comes an hour when, panting and puffing (as even now!) my head emerges
+again, to say nothing of my heart. I have treasured your petit mot from
+a point of space unidentified, but despatched from a Holland-America
+ship and bearing a French and a Pas-de-Calais postage-stamp (a bit
+bewilderingly)--treasured it for the last month as a link with your
+receding form: the recession of which makes me miss your presence in
+this hemisphere out of proportion somehow to the--to any--frequency with
+which fortune enables me to enjoy it. But I still keep hold of the
+pledge that your retention (as I understand you) of your Paris apartment
+constitutes toward your soon coming back--and really feel that with a
+return under your protection and management absolutely guaranteed me, I
+too should have liked to tempt again the adventure with you; should have
+liked again to taste of the natal air--and perhaps even in a wider
+draught than you will go in for. However, I have neither your youth,
+your sinews, nor your fortune--let alone your other domestic blessings
+and reinforcements--and somehow the memory of what was fierce and
+formidable in our colossal country the last time I was there prevails
+with me over softer emotions, and I feel I shall never alight on it
+again save as upborne on the wings of some miracle that isn't in the
+least likely to occur. The nearest I shall come to it will be in my
+impatience for your return with the choice collection of notes I hope
+you will have taken for me. You have chosen a good year for absence--I
+mean a deplorable, an infamous one, in "Europe," for any joy or
+convenience of air or weather. The pleasant land of France lies soaking
+as well as _this_ more confessed and notorious sponge, I believe;--and I
+have now for months found life no better than a beastly sea-voyage of
+storms and submersions under closed hatches. We rot with dampness,
+confinement and despair--in short we are reduced to the abjectness, as
+you see, of literally _talking_ weather. You will see our Nephew Bill, I
+trust, promptly, in your rich art-world la-bas, and I beg you to add
+your pressure to mine on the question of our absolutely soon enjoying
+him over here. I am under a semi-demi-pledge to go to Paris for a
+fortnight in April--but it would be a more positive prospect, I think,
+if I knew I were to find you all there. Give my bestest love to Lilla,
+please, and my untutored homages to the Daughters of Music. Try to see
+Howells chez lui--so as to bring me every detail. Feel thus how much I
+count on you and receive from me every invocation proper to this annual
+crisis. May the genius of our common country have you in its most--or
+least?--energetic keeping. Yours, my dear Thomas, ever,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Owen Wister._
+
+/#
+ The links will be recognised in this letter with H. J.'s old
+ friend, Mrs. Fanny Kemble. Her daughters were Mrs. Leigh, wife of
+ the Dean of Hereford, and the mother of Mr. Owen Wister.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+Dec. 26th, 1909.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Owen!
+*/
+
+Your so benevolent telegram greatly touches me, and I send you off this
+slower-travelling but all faithful and affectionate acknowledgment
+within an hour or two of receiving it. It hasn't told me much--save
+indeed that you sometimes think of me and are moved, as it were, toward
+me; and that verily--though I am incapable of supposing the contrary--is
+not a little. What I miss and deplore is some definite knowledge of how
+you are--deeply aware as I am that it adds a burden and a terror to
+ill-health to have to keep reporting to one's friends _how_ ill one
+is--or isn't. That's the last thing I dream of from you--and I possess
+my soul, and my desire for you, in patience--or I try to. I don't see
+any one, however, whom I can appeal to for light about you--for I
+missed, most lamentably, Florence La Farge during her heart-breaking
+little mockery of sixteen days in England a few weeks ago; she having
+written me in advance that she would come and see me, and then, within a
+few hours after her arrival, engaged herself so deep that she apparently
+couldn't manage it--nor I manage to get to London during the snatch of
+time she was there (for she was mainly in the country only.) I had had
+an idea that she would authentically know about you, and had I seen her
+I would have pumped her dry. I was at the Deanery for three or four days
+in September (quite incredibly--for the Hereford Festival,) and they
+were most kind, the Dean dear and delightful beyond even his ancient
+dearness etc.; but we only could fondly speculate and vainly theorize
+and yearn over you--and that didn't see us much forrarder. That I hope
+you are safe and sound again, and firm on your feet, and planning and
+tending somehow hitherward--that I hope this with fierce intensity I
+need scarcely assure you, need I? But the years melt away, and the
+changes multiply, and the facilities (some of them) diminish; the sands
+in the hour-glass run, in short, and Sister Anne comes down from her
+tower and says she sees nothing of you. But here I am where you last
+left me--and writing even now, late at night, in the little old oaken
+parlour where we had such memorable and admirable discourse. The sofa on
+which you stretched yourself is there behind me--and it holds out
+appealing little padded arms to you. I don't seem to recognise any
+particular nearness for my being able to revisit _your_ prodigious
+scene. The more the chill of age settles upon me the more formidable it
+seems. And I haven't myself had a very famous year here--for a few
+months in fact rather a bad and perturbing one; but which has
+considerably cleared and redeemed itself now. We are just emerging from
+the rather deadly oppression of the English Xmastide--which I have
+spent at home for the first time for four years--a lone and lorn and
+stranded friend or two being with me; with a long breath of relief that
+the worst is over. Terrific postal matter has accumulated, however--and
+the arrears of my correspondence make me quail and almost collapse. You
+see in this, already, the rather weary hand and head--but please feel
+and find in it too (with my true blessing on your wife and weans) all
+the old affection of your devoted
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+RYE AND CHELSEA
+
+(1910-1914)
+
+
+For the next year--that is for the whole of 1910--Henry James was under
+the shadow of an illness, partly physical but mainly nervous, which
+deprived him of all power to work and caused him immeasurable suffering
+of mind. In spite of a constitution that in many ways was notably
+strong, the question of his health was always a matter of some concern
+to him, and he was by nature inclined to anticipate trouble; so that his
+temperament was not one that would easily react against a malady of
+which the chief burden was mental depression of the darkest kind. It
+would be impossible to exaggerate the distress that afflicted him for
+many months; but his determination to surmount it was unshaken and his
+recovery was largely a triumph of will. Fortunately he had the most
+sympathetic help at hand, over and above devoted medical care. Professor
+and Mrs. William James had planned to spend the summer in Europe again,
+and when they heard of his condition they hastened out to be with him as
+soon as possible. The company of his beloved brother and sister-in-law
+was the best in the world for him--indeed he could scarcely face any
+other; only with their support he felt able to cover the difficult
+stages of his progress. It was William James's health, once more, that
+had made Europe necessary for him; he was in fact much more gravely ill
+than his brother, but it was not until later in the summer that his
+state began to cause alarm. By that time Henry, after paying a visit
+with his sister-in-law to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hunter at Epping, had
+joined him at Nauheim, in Germany, where a very anxious situation had to
+be met. While William James was losing ground, Henry was still suffering
+greatly, and the prospect of being separated from his family by their
+return to America was unendurable to him. It was decided that he should
+go with them, and they sailed before the end of August. They had just
+received the news of the death in America of their youngest brother,
+Robertson James, whose epitaph, memorial of an "agitated and agitating
+life," was afterwards written with grave tenderness in the "Notes of a
+Son and Brother."
+
+William James sank very rapidly as they made the voyage, and the end
+came when they reached his home in the New Hampshire mountains. There is
+no need to say how deeply Henry mourned the loss of the nearest and
+dearest friend of his whole life; nothing can be added to the letters
+that will presently be read. All the more he clung to his brother's
+family, the centre of his profoundest affection. He remained with them
+during the winter at Cambridge, where very gradually he began to emerge
+from the darkness of depression and to feel capable of work again. He
+took up with interest a suggestion, made to him by Mrs. William James,
+that he should write some account of his parents and his early life; and
+as this idea developed in his mind it fed the desire to return home and
+devote himself to a record of old memories. He lingered on in America,
+however, for the summer of 1911, now so much restored that he could
+enjoy visits to several friends. He welcomed, furthermore, two signs of
+appreciation that reached him almost at the same time--the offer of
+honorary degrees at Harvard and at Oxford. The Harvard degree was
+conferred before he left America, the Oxford doctorate of letters in the
+following year, when he received it in the company of the Poet Laureate.
+
+As soon as he was established at Lamb House again (September 1911) he
+set to work upon A Small Boy and Others, and for a long time to come he
+was principally occupied with this book and the sequel to it. He went
+abroad no more and was never long away from Rye or London; but his power
+of regular work was not what it had been before his illness, and
+excepting a few of the papers in Notes on Novelists the two volumes of
+reminiscences were all that he wrote before the end of 1913. His health
+was still an anxiety, and his letters show that he began to regard
+himself as definitely committed to the life of an invalid. Yet it would
+be easy, perhaps, to gain a wrong impression from them of his state
+during these years. His physical troubles were certainly sometimes
+acute, but he kept his remarkable capacity for throwing them off, and in
+converse with his friends his vigour of life seemed to have suffered
+little. He had always loved slow and lengthy walks with a single
+companion, and possibly the most noticeable change was only that these
+became slower than ever, with more numerous pauses at points of interest
+or for the development of some picturesque turn of the talk. The grassy
+stretches between Rye and its sea-shore were exactly suited to long
+afternoons of this kind, and with a friend, better still a nephew or
+niece, to walk with him, such was the occupation he preferred to any
+other. For the winter and spring he continued to return to London, where
+he still had his club-lodging in Pall Mall. After a sharp and very
+painful illness at Rye in the autumn of 1912 he moved into a more
+convenient dwelling--a small flat in Cheyne Walk, overhanging the
+Chelsea river-side. Here the long level of the embankment gave him
+opportunities of exercise as agreeable in their way as those at Rye, and
+he found himself liking to stay on in this "simplified London" until the
+height of the summer.
+
+April 15, 1913, was his seventieth birthday, and a large company, nearly
+three hundred in number, of his English circle seized the occasion to
+make him a united offering of friendship. They asked him to allow his
+portrait to be painted by one of themselves, Mr. John S. Sargent. Henry
+James was touched and pleased, and for the next year the fortunes of Mr.
+Sargent's work are fully recorded in the correspondence--from its happy
+completion and the private view of it in the artist's studio, to the
+violence it suffered at the hands of a political agitatress, while it
+hung in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1914, and its successful
+restoration from its injuries. The picture now belongs to the National
+Portrait Gallery. On Mr. Sargent's commission a bust of Henry James was
+at the same time modelled by Mr. Derwent Wood.
+
+Early in 1914, after an interval of all but ten years, Henry James began
+what he had often said he should never begin again--a long novel. It was
+the novel, at last, of American life, long ago projected and abandoned,
+and now revived as The Ivory Tower. Slowly and with many interruptions
+he proceeded with it, and he was well in the midst of it when he left
+Chelsea for Lamb House in July 1914. His health was now on a better
+level than for some time past, and he counted on a peaceful and fruitful
+autumn of work at Rye.
+
+
+
+
+_To T. Bailey Saunders._
+
+
+/*
+L. H.
+
+Jan. 27th [1910].
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Bailey,
+*/
+
+I am still in bed, attended by doctor and nurse, but doing very well and
+mending _now_ very steadily and smoothly--so that I hope to be
+practically up early next week. Also I am touched by, and appreciative
+of, your solicitude. (You see I still cling to syntax or style, or
+whatever it is.) But I have had an infernal time really--I may now
+confide to you--pretty well all the while since I left you that sad and
+sinister morning to come back from the station. A digestive crisis
+making food loathsome and nutrition impossible--and sick inanition and
+weakness and depression permanent. However, _bed_, the good Skinner,
+M.D., the gentle nurse, with very small feedings administered every 2
+hours, have got the better of the cursed state, and I am now hungry and
+redeemed and convalescent. The Election fight has revealed to me how
+ardent a Liberal lurks in the cold and clammy exterior of your
+
+/*
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+/#
+ The allusions in the following are to articles by Mr. W. Morton
+ Fullerton (in the _Times_) on the disastrous floods in Paris, and
+ to Alfred de Musset's "Lettres d'amour a Aimee d'Alton."
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+February 8th, 1910.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Edith,
+*/
+
+I am in receipt of endless bounties from you and dazzling revelations
+about you: item: 1st: the grapes of Paradise that arrived yesterday in a
+bloom of purple and a burst of sweetness that made me--while they cast
+their Tyrian glamour about--ask more ruefully than ever what porridge
+poor _non_-convalescent John Keats mustn't have had: 2d: your exquisite
+appeal and approach to the good--the really admirable Skinner, who has
+now wrung tears of emotion from my eyes by bringing them to my
+knowledge: 3d: your gentle "holograph" letter, just to hand--which
+treats _my_ stupid reflections on your own patience with such heavenly
+gentleness. When one is still sickish and shaky (though that, thank
+goodness, is steadily ebbing) one tumbles wrong--even when one has
+wanted to make the most delicate geste in life. But the great thing is
+that we always tumble together--more and more never apart; and that for
+that happy exercise and sweet coincidence of agility we may trust
+ourselves and each other to the end of time. So I gratefully grovel for
+everything--and for your beautiful and generous inquiry of Skinner ...
+more than even anything else. The purple clusters are, none the less, of
+a prime magnificence and of an inexpressible relevance to my state. This
+is steadily bettering--thanks above all to three successive morning
+motor-rides that Skinner has taken me, of an hour and a half each
+(to-day in fact nearly two hours), while he goes his rounds in a fairly
+far circuit over the country-side. I sit at cottage and farmhouse doors
+while he warns and comforts and commands within, and, these days having
+been mild and grey and convenient, the effect has been of the last
+benignity. I am thus exceedingly sustained. And also by the knowledge
+that you are not being wrenched from your hard-bought foyer and your
+neighbourhood to your best of brothers. Cramponnez-vous-y. I don't ask
+you about poor great Paris--I make out as I can by Morton's playing
+flashlight. And I read Walkley on Chantecler--which sounds rather like a
+glittering void. I have now dealt with Alfred and Aimee--unprofitable
+pair. What a strange and compromising French document--in this sense
+that it affects one as giving so many people and things away, by the
+simple fact of springing so characteristically and almost squalidly out
+of them. The letter in which Alf. arranges for her to come into his
+dirty bedroom at 8 a.m., while his mother and brother and others
+unknowingly _grouillent_ on the other side of the cloison that shall
+make their _nid d'amour_, and _la facon dont elle y vole_ react back
+even upon dear old George rather fatally--apropos of dirty bedrooms,
+thin cloisons and the usual state of things, one surmises, at that hour.
+What an Aimee and what a Paul and what a Mme Jaubert and what an
+everything!
+
+/*
+Ever your
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Jessie Allen._
+
+/#
+ The plan here projected of looking for a house in Eaton Terrace,
+ where Miss Allen lived, was not carried further.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+February 20th, 1910.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear eternally martyred and murdered Goody,
+*/
+
+I am horribly ashamed to have my poor hand forced (you see what it is
+and what it's reduced to) into piling up on your poor burdened
+consciousness the added load of _my_ base woes (as if you weren't lying
+stretched flat beneath the pressure of your own and those of some
+special dozen or two of your most favourite and fatal vampires.) I
+proposed you should know nothing of mine till they were all over--if
+they ever _should_ be (which they are not quite yet:) and that if one
+had to speak of them to you at all, it might thus be in the most
+pluperfect of all past tenses and twiddling one's fingers on the tip of
+one's nose, quite vulgarly, as to intimate that you were a day after the
+fair.... But why do I unfold this gruesome tale when just what I most
+want is _not_ to wring your insanely generous heart or work upon your
+perversely exquisite sensibility? I am pulling through, and though I've
+been so often somewhat better only to find myself topple back into black
+despair--with bad, vilely bad, days after good ones, and not a _very_
+famous one to-day--I do feel that I have definitely turned the corner
+and got the fiend down, even though he still kicks as viciously as he
+can yet manage. I am "up" and dressed, and in short I _eat_--after a
+fashion, and have regained considerable weight (oh I had become the
+loveliest sylph,) and even, I am told, a certain charm of appearance. My
+good nephew Harry James, priceless youth, my elder brother's eldest
+son, sailed from N.Y. yesterday to come out and see me--and that alone
+lifts up my heart--for I have felt a very lonesome and stranded old
+idiot. My conditions (of circumstance, house and care, &c) have on the
+other hand been excellent--my servants angels of affection and devotion.
+(I have indeed been _all_ in Doctor's and Nurse's hands.) So don't take
+it hard now; take it utterly easy and allow your charity to stray a
+little by way of a change into your own personal premises. Take a look
+in _there_ and let it even make you linger. To hear you are doing _that_
+will do me more good than anything else....
+
+I yearn unutterably to get on far enough to begin to plan to come up to
+town for a while. I have of late reacted intensely against this exile
+from some of the resources of civilization in winter--and deliriously
+dream of some future footing in London again (other than my club) for
+the space of time between Xmas or so and June. What is the rent of a
+house--unfurnished of course (a little good _inside_ one)--in your
+Terrace?--and are there any with 2 or 3 servants' bedrooms?
+
+Don't answer this absurdity now--but wait till we go and look at 2 or 3
+together! Such is the recuperative yearning of your enfeebled but not
+beaten--you can see by this scrawl--old
+
+/*
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Bigelow._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+April 19th, 1910.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Edith,
+*/
+
+I have been much touched by your solicitude, but till now absolutely too
+"bad" to write--to do anything but helplessly, yearningly languish and
+suffer and surrender. I have had a perfect Hell of a Time--since just
+after Xmas--nearly 15 long weeks of dismal, dreary, interminable illness
+(with occasional slight pickings-up followed by black relapses.) But the
+tide, thank the Powers, has at last definitely turned and I am on the
+way to getting not only better, but, as I believe, creepily and abjectly
+well. I sent my Nurse (my second) flying the other day, after ten deadly
+weeks of her, and her predecessor's, aggressive presence and policy, and
+the mere relief from that overdone discipline has done wonders for me. I
+must have patience, much, yet--but my face is toward the light, which
+shows, beautifully, that I look ten years older, with my bonny tresses
+ten degrees whiter (like Marie Antoinette's in the Conciergerie.)
+However if I've lost all my beauty and (by my expenses) most of my
+money, I rejoice I've kept my friends, and I shall come and show you
+_that_ appreciation yet. I am so delighted that you and the Daughterling
+had your go at Italy--even though I was feeling so pre-eminently
+un-Italian. The worst of that Paradise is indeed that one returns but to
+Purgatories at the best. Have a little patience yet with your still
+struggling but all clinging
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To W. E. Norris._
+
+
+/*
+Hill Hall,
+Theydon Bois,
+Epping.
+
+May 22nd, 1910.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Norris,
+*/
+
+Forgive a very brief letter and a very sad one, in which I must explain
+long and complicated things in a very few words. I have had a
+dismal--the most dismal and interminable illness; going on these five
+months nearly, since Christmas--and of which the end is not yet; and of
+which all this later stage has been (these ten or twelve weeks) a
+development of nervous conditions (agitation, trepidation, black
+melancholia and weakness) of a--the most--formidable and distressing
+kind. My brother and sister-in-law most blessedly came on to me from
+America several weeks ago; without them I had--should have--quite gone
+under; and a week ago, under extreme medical urgency as to change of
+air, scene, food, everything, I came here with my sister-in-law--to some
+most kind friends and a beautiful place--as a very arduous experiment.
+But I'm too ill to be here really, and shall crawl home as soon as
+possible. I'm afraid I can't see you in London--I can plan nor do
+nothing; and can only ask you, in my weakness, depression and
+helplessness, to pardon this doleful story from your affectionate and
+afflicted old
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+
+/*
+Bittongs Hotel Hohenzollern,
+Bad Nauheim.
+
+June 10th, 1910.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Edith,
+*/
+
+Your kindest note met me here on my arrival with my sister last evening.
+We are infinitely touched by the generous expression of it, but there
+had been, and could be, no question for us of Paris--formidable at best
+(that is in general) as a place of rapid transit. I had, to my sorrow, a
+baddish drop on coming back from high Epping Forest (that is "Theydon
+Mount") to poor little flat and stale and illness-haunted Rye--and I
+felt, my Dr. strongly urging, safety to be in a prompt escape by the
+straightest way (Calais, Brussels, Cologne, and Frankfort,) to this
+place of thick woods, groves, springs and general Kurort soothingness,
+where my brother had been for a fortnight waiting us alone. Here I am
+then and having made the journey, in great heat, far better than I
+feared. Slowly but definitely I _am_ emerging--yet with nervous
+possibilities still too latent, too in ambush, for me to do anything but
+cling for as much longer as possible to my Brother and sister. I am
+wholly unfit to be alone--in spite of amelioration. That (being alone) I
+can't even as yet think of--and yet feel that I must for many months to
+come have none of the complications of society. In fine, to break to you
+the monstrous truth, I have taken my passage with them to America by the
+Canadian Pacific Steamer line ("short sea") on August 12th--to spend the
+winter in America. I must break with everything--of the last couple of
+years in England--and am trying if possible to let Lamb House for the
+winter--also am giving up my London perch. When I come back I must have
+a better. There are the grim facts--but now that I have accepted them I
+see hope and reason in them. I feel that the completeness of the change
+la-bas will help me more than anything else can--and the amount of
+corners I have already turned (though my nervous spectre still again and
+again scares me) is a kind of earnest of the rest of the process. I
+cling to my companions even as a frightened cry-baby to his nurse and
+protector--but of all that it is depressing, almost degrading to speak.
+This place is insipid, yet soothing--very bosky and sedative and
+admirably arranged, a l'allemande--but with excessive and depressing
+heat just now, and a toneless air at the best. The admirable ombrages
+and walks and pacifying pitch of life make up, however, for much. We
+shall be here for three weeks longer (I seem to entrevoir) and then try
+for something Swiss and tonic. We must be in England by Aug. 1st.
+
+And now I simply _fear_ to challenge you on your own complications. I
+can _bear_ tragedies so little. Tout se rattache so a _the_ thing--the
+central depression. And yet I want so to know--and I think of you with
+infinite tenderness, participation--and such a large and helpless
+devotion. Well, we must hold on tight and we shall come out again face
+to face--wiser than ever before (if that's any advantage!) This address,
+I foresee, will find me for the next 15 days--and we might be worse
+abrites. Germany has become _comfortable_. Note that much as I yearn to
+you, I don't nag you with categorical (even though in Germany)
+questions.... Ever your unspeakable, dearest Edith,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+July 29th, 1910.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Edith,
+*/
+
+It's intense joy to hear from you, and when I think that the last news I
+gave you of myself was at Nauheim (it seems to me), with the nightmare
+of Switzerland that followed--"Munich and the Tyrol etc.," which I
+believe I then hinted at to you, proved the vainest crazy dream of but a
+moment--I feel what the strain and stress of the sequel that awaited me
+really became. That dire ordeal (attempted Nach-Kurs for my poor brother
+at _low_ Swiss altitudes, Constance, Zurich, Lucerne, Geneva, &c.)
+terminated however a fortnight ago--or more--and after a bad week in
+London we are here waiting to sail on Aug. 12th. I am definitely much
+better, and on the road to be _well_; a great gain has come to me, in
+spite of everything, during the last ten days in particular. I say in
+spite of everything, for my dear brother's condition, already so bad on
+leaving the treacherous and disastrous Nauheim, has gone steadily on to
+worse--he is painfully ill, weak and down, and the anxiety of it, with
+our voyage in view, is a great tension to me in my still quite
+_struggling_ upward state. But I stand and hold my ground none the less,
+and we have really brought him on since we left London. But the
+dismalness of it all--and of the sudden death, a fortnight ago, of our
+younger brother in the U.S. by heart-failure in his sleep--a painless,
+peaceful, enviable end to a stormy and unhappy career--makes our common
+situation, all these months back and now, fairly tragic and miserable.
+However, I am convinced that his getting home, if it can be securely
+done, will do much for William--and I am myself now on a much "higher
+plane" than I expected a very few weeks since to be. I kind of _want_,
+uncannily, to go to America too--apart from several absolutely
+imperative reasons for it. I rejoice unspeakably in the vision of seeing
+you ... here--or even in London or at Windsor--one of these very next
+days....
+
+/*
+Ever your all-affectionate, dear Edith,
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Bruce Porter._
+
+/#
+ The "betises" were certain Baconian clues to the authorship of
+ Shakespeare's plays, which Mr. Bruce Porter had come from America
+ to investigate.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+[August 1910.]
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear--very!--Bruce,
+*/
+
+I rejoice to hear from you even though it entails the irritation (I
+brutally showed you, in town, my accessibility to that) of your
+misguided search for a sensation. You renew my harmless rage--for I hate
+to see you associated (with my firm affection for you) with the most
+provincial _betises_, and to have come so far to do it--to _be_ it
+(given over to a, to _the_ Betise!) in a fine finished old England with
+which one can have so much better relations, and so many of them--it
+would make me blush, or bleed, for you, could anything you do cause me a
+really _deep_ discomfort. But nothing can--I too tenderly look the other
+way. So there we are. Besides you have _had_ your measles--and, though
+you might have been better employed, go in peace--be measly no more. At
+any rate I grossly want you to know that I am really ever so much better
+than when we were together in London. I go on quite as well as I could
+decently hope. It's an ineffable blessing. It's horrible somehow that
+those brief moments shall have been all our meeting here, and that a
+desert wider than the sea shall separate us over there; but this is a
+part of that perversity in life which long ago gave me the ultimate
+ache, and I cherish the memory of our scant London luck. My brother,
+too, has taken a much better turn--and we sail on the 12th definitely.
+So rejoice with me and believe me, my dear Bruce, all affectionately
+yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Grace Norton._
+
+
+/*
+Chocorua, New Hampshire.
+
+August 26, 1910.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Grace,
+*/
+
+I am deeply touched by your tender note--and all the more that we have
+need of tenderness, in a special degree, here now. We arrived, William
+and Alice and I, in this strange, sad, rude spot, a week ago
+to-night--after a most trying journey from Quebec (though after a most
+beautiful, quick, in itself auspicious voyage too,) but with William
+critically, mortally ill and with our anxiety and tension now (he has
+rapidly got so much worse) a real anguish.... Alice is terribly
+exhausted and spent--but the rest she will be able to take must
+presently increase, and Harry, who, after leaving us at Quebec, started
+with a friend on a much-needed holiday in the New Brunswick woods (for
+shooting and fishing), was wired to yesterday to come back to us at
+once. So I give you, dear Grace, our dismal chronicle of suspense and
+pain. My own fears are the blackest, and at the prospect of losing my
+wonderful beloved brother out of the world in which, from as far back as
+in dimmest childhood, I have so yearningly always counted on him, I feel
+nothing but the abject weakness of grief and even terror; but I forgive
+myself "weakness"--my emergence from the long and grim ordeal of my own
+peculiarly dismal and trying illness isn't yet absolutely complete
+enough to make me wholly firm on my feet. But _my_ slowly recuperative
+process goes on despite all shakes and shocks, while dear William's, in
+the full climax of his intrinsic powers and intellectual ambitions,
+meets this tragic, cruel arrest. However, dear Grace, I won't further
+wail to you in my nervous soreness and sorrow--still, in spite of so
+much revival, more or less under the shadow as I am of the miserable,
+damnable year that began for me last Christmas-time and for which I had
+been spoiling for two years before. I will only wait to see you--with
+all the tenderness of our long, unbroken friendship and all the host of
+our common initiations. I have come for a long stay--though when we
+shall be able to plan for a resumption of life in Irving Street is of
+course insoluble as yet. Then, at all events, with what eagerness your
+threshold will be crossed by your faithfullest old
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+P.S. It's to-day blessedly cooler here--and I hope you also have the
+reprieve!
+
+P.S. I open my letter of three hours since to add that William passed
+unconsciously away an hour ago--without apparent pain or struggle. Think
+of us, dear Grace, think of us!
+
+
+
+
+_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._
+
+
+/*
+Chocorua, N.H.
+Sept. 2nd, 1910.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear old Thomas,
+*/
+
+I sit heavily stricken and in darkness--for from far back in dimmest
+childhood he had been my ideal Elder Brother, and I still, through all
+the years, saw in him, even as a small timorous boy yet, my protector,
+my backer, my authority and my pride. His extinction changes the face of
+life for me--besides the mere missing of his inexhaustible company and
+personality, originality, the whole unspeakably vivid and beautiful
+presence of him. And his noble intellectual vitality was still but at
+its climax--he had two or three ardent purposes and plans. He had cast
+them away, however, at the end--I mean that, dreadfully suffering, he
+wanted only to die. Alice and I had a bitter pilgrimage with him from
+far off--he sank here, on his threshold; and then it went horribly fast.
+I cling for the present to _them_--and so try to stay here through this
+month. After that I shall be with them in Cambridge for several more--we
+shall cleave more together. I should like to come and see you for a
+couple of days much, but it would have to be after the 20th, or even
+October 1st, I think; and I fear you may not then be still in
+villeggiatura. _If_ so I _will_ come. You knew him--among those living
+now--from furthest back with me. Yours and Lilla's all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+
+/*
+Chocorua, N.H.
+Sept. 9th, 1910.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Edith,
+*/
+
+Your letter from Annecy ... touches me, as I sit here stricken and in
+darkness, with the tenderest of hands. It was all to become again a
+black nightmare (what seems to me such now,) from very soon after I left
+you, to these days of attempted readjustment of life, on the basis of my
+beloved brother's irredeemable absence from it, in which I take my part
+with my sister-in-law and his children here. I quitted you at
+Folkestone, August 9th (just a month ago to-day--and it seems six!) to
+find him, at Lamb House, apparently not a little eased by the devoted
+Skinner, and with the elements much more auspicious for our journey than
+they had been a fortnight before. We got well enough to town on the
+11th, and away from it, to Liverpool, on the 12th, and the voyage, in
+the best accommodations &c we had ever had at sea, and of a wondrous
+lakelike and riverlike fairness and brevity, might, if he had been
+really less ill, have made for his holding his ground. But he grew
+rapidly worse again from the start and suffered piteously and dreadfully
+(with the increase of his difficulty in breathing;) and we got him at
+last to this place (on the evening of the Friday following that of our
+sailing) only to see him begin swiftly to sink. The sight of the
+rapidity of it at the last was an unutterable pang--my sense of what he
+had still to _give_, of his beautiful genius and noble intellect at
+their very climax, never having been anything but intense, and in fact
+having been intenser than ever all these last months. However, my
+relation to him and my affection for him, and the different aspect his
+extinction has given for me to my life, are all unutterable matters;
+fortunately, as there would be so _much_ to say about them if I said
+anything at all. The effect of it all is that I shall stay on here for
+the present--for some months to come (I mean in this country;) and then
+return to England never to revisit these shores again. I am
+inexpressibly glad to have been, and even to be, here now--I cling to my
+sister-in-law and my nephews and niece: they are all (wonderful to say)
+such admirable, lovable, able and interesting persons, and they cling to
+me in return. I hope to be in this spot with them till Oct. 15th--there
+is a great appeal in it from its saturation with my brother's presence
+and life here, his use and liking of it for 23 years, a sad subtle
+consecration which plays out the more where so few other things
+interfere with it. Ah, the thin, empty, lonely, melancholy American
+"beauty"--which I yet find a cold prudish charm in! I shall go back to
+Cambridge with my companions and stay there at least till the New
+Year--which is all that seems definite for the present....
+
+All devotedly yours, dearest Edith,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Charles Hunter._
+
+
+/*
+Chocorua, N.H.
+Oct: 1: 1910.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Mary Hunter,
+*/
+
+Beautiful and tender the letter I just receive from you--and that
+follows by a few days an equally beneficent one to my sister. She will
+(if she hasn't done it already) thank you for this herself--and tell you
+how deeply we feel the kindly balm of your faithful thought of us. Our
+return here, with my brother so acutely suffering and so all too
+precipitately (none the less) succumbing altogether--quite against what
+seemed presumable during our last three weeks in England--was a dreadful
+time; from the worst darkness of which we are, however, gradually
+emerging.... What is for the time a great further support is the
+wondrous beauty of this region, where we are lingering on three or four
+weeks more (when it becomes too cold in a house built only for
+summer--in spite of glorious wood-fires;) this season being the finest
+thing in the American year for weather and colour. The former is golden
+and the latter, amid these innumerable mountains and great forests and
+frequent lakes, a magnificence of crimson and orange, a mixture of
+flames and gems. I shall stay for some months (I mean on this side of
+the sea;) and yet I am so homesick that I seem to feel that when I do
+get back to dear little old England, I shall never in my life leave it
+again. We cling to each other, all of us here, meanwhile, and I can
+never be sufficiently grateful to my fate for my having been with my
+dearest brother for so many weeks before his death and up to the bitter
+end. I am better and better than three months ago, thank heaven, in
+spite of everything, and really believe I shall end by being better
+than I have been at all these last years, when I was spoiling for my
+illness. I pray most devoutly that Salso will again repay and refresh
+and comfort you; I absolutely yearn to see you, and I am yours all
+affectionately always,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
+
+
+/*
+95 Irving Street,
+Cambridge, Mass.
+October 29th, 1910.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Lucy!
+*/
+
+My silence has been atrocious, since the receipt of two quite divine
+letters from you, but the most particular blessing of you is that with
+you one needn't explain nor elaborate nor take up the burden of dire
+demonstration, because you understand and you feel, you allow, and you
+_know_, and above all you love (your poor old entangled and afflicted
+H.J.).... Now at last I am really on the rise and on the higher ground
+again--more than I have been, and more unmistakeably, than at any time
+since the first of my illness. Your letters meanwhile, dearest Lucy,
+were admirable and exquisite, in their rare beauty of your knowing, for
+the appreciation of such a loss and such a wound, immensely what you
+were talking about. Every word went to my heart, and it was as if you
+sat by me and held my hand and let me wail, and wailed yourself, so
+gently and intelligently, _with_ me. The extinction of such a presence
+in my life as my great and radiant (even in suffering and sorrow)
+brother's, means a hundred things that I can't begin to say; but
+immense, all the same, are the abiding possessions, the interest and the
+honour. We will talk of all these things by your endlessly friendly
+fire in due time again (oh how I gnash my teeth with homesickness at
+that dear little Chilworth St. vision of old lamp lit gossiping hours!)
+and we will pull together meanwhile as intimately and unitedly as
+possible even thus across the separating sea. I have pretty well settled
+to remain on this side of that wintry obstacle till late in the spring.
+I am at present with my priceless sister-in-law and her dear delightful
+children. We came back a short time since from the country (I going for
+ten days to New York, the prodigious, from which I have just returned,
+while she, after her so long and tragic absence, settled us admirably
+for the winter.) We all hang unspeakably together, and that's why I am
+staying. I am getting back to work--though the flood of letters to be
+breasted by reason of my brother's death and situation has been
+formidable in the extreme, and the "breasting" (with the very weak hand
+only that I have been able, till now to lend) is even yet far from over.
+My companions are unspeakably kind to me, and I cherish the break in the
+excess of solitude that I have been steeped in these last years. If I
+get as "well" as I see reason now at last to believe, I shall be
+absolutely better than at any time for three or four--and shall even
+feel sweetly younger (by a miraculous emergence from my hideous year.)
+Dreams of work come back to me--which I've a superstitious dread still,
+however, of talking about. Materially and carnally speaking my
+"comfort"--odious word!--in a most pleasant, commodious house, is
+absolute, and is much fostered by my having brought with me my devoted
+if diminutive Burgess, whom you will remember at Lamb House.... During
+all which time, however, see how I don't prod you with questions about
+yourself--in spite of my burning thirst for knowledge. After the
+generosity of your letters of last month how can I ask you to labour
+again in my too thankless cause? But I do yearn over you, and I needn't
+tell you how any rough sketch of your late history will gladden my
+sight. I wrote a day or two ago to Hugh Walpole and besought him to go
+and see you and make me some sign of you--which going and gathering-in I
+hope he of himself, and constantly, takes to. I think of you as always
+heroic--but I hope that no particular extra need for it has lately
+salted your cup. Is Margaret on better ground again? God grant it! But
+such things as I wish to talk about--I mean that we _might_! But with
+patience the hour will strike--like silver smiting silver. Till then I
+am so far-offishly and so affectionately yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To W. E. Norris._
+
+
+/*
+95 Irving St.
+Cambridge, Mass.
+Dec. 13th, 1910.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Norris,
+*/
+
+I detest the thought that some good word or other from me shouldn't add
+to the burden with which your Xmas table will groan; fortunately too the
+decently "good" word (as goods go at this dark crisis) is the one that I
+_can_ break my long and hideous silence to send you. The only difficulty
+is that when silences have been so long and so hideous the renewal of
+the communication, the patching-up (as regards the mere facts) of the
+weakened and ragged link, becomes in itself a necessity, or a question,
+formidable even to deterrence. I have had verily an _annee
+terrible_--the fag-end of which is, however, an immense improvement on
+everything that has preceded it. I won't attempt, none the less, to make
+up arrears of information in any degree whatever--but simply let off at
+you this rude but affectionate signal from the desert-island of my
+shipwreck--or what would be such if my situation were not, on the whole,
+the one with which I am for the present most in tune. I am staying on
+here with my dear and admirable sister-in-law and her children, with
+whom I have been ever since my beloved and illustrious elder brother's
+death in the country at the end of August.... My younger brother had
+died just a month before--and I am alone now, of my father's once rather
+numerous house. But there--I am trying to pick up lost chords--which is
+what I didn't mean to ... I expect to stick fast here through January
+and then go for a couple of months to New York--after which I shall
+begin to turn my face to England--heaven send that day! The detail of
+this is, however, fluid and subject to alteration--in everything save my
+earnest purpose of struggling back by April or May at furthest to your
+(or verily _my_) distressed country; for which I unceasingly
+languish.... The material conditions here (that is the best of
+them--others intensely and violently _not_) suit me singularly at
+present; as for instance the great and glorious American fact of
+weather, to which it all mainly comes back, but which, since last August
+here, I have never known anything to surpass. While I write you this I
+bask in golden December sunshine and dry, crisp, mild frost--over a
+great _nappe_ of recent snow, which flushes with the "tenderest" lights.
+This does me a world of good--and the fact that I have brought with me
+my little Lamb House servant, who has lived with me these 10 years; but
+for the rest my life is exclusively in this one rich nest of old
+affections and memories. I put you, you see, no questions, but please
+find half a dozen very fond ones wrapped up in every good wish I send
+you for the coming year. A couple of nos. of the _Times_ have just come
+in--and though the telegraph has made them rather ancient history I
+hang over them for the dear old more vivid sense of it all....
+
+Yours, my dear Norris, all affectionately,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+
+/*
+95 Irving Street,
+Cambridge, Mass.
+Feb. 9th, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Edith,
+*/
+
+Hideous and infamous, yes, my interminable, my abjectly graceless
+silence. But it always comes, in these abnormal months, from the same
+sorry little cause, which I have already named to you to such satiety
+that I really might omit any further reference to it. Somehow, none the
+less, I find a vague support in my consciousness of an unsurpassable
+abjection (as aforesaid) in naming it once more to _myself_ and putting
+afresh on record that there's a method in what I feel might pass for my
+madness if _you_ weren't so nobly sane. To write is perforce _to report
+of myself_ and my condition--and nothing has happened to make that
+process any less an evil thing. It's horrible to me to report darkly and
+dismally--and yet I never venture three steps in the opposite direction
+without having the poor effrontery flung back in my face as an outrage
+on the truth. In other words, to report favourably is instantly--or at
+very short order--to be hurled back on the couch of anguish--so that the
+only thing has, for the most part, been to stay my pen rather than _not_
+report favourably. You'll say doubtless: "Damn you, why report _at
+all_--if you are so crassly superstitious? Answer civilly and prettily
+and punctually when a lady (and 'such a lady,' as Browning says!)
+generously and a deux reprises writes to you--without 'dragging in
+Velasquez' at all." Very well then, I'll try--though it was after all
+pretty well poor old Velasquez who came back three evenings since from
+23 days in New York, and at 21 East 11th St., of which the last six were
+practically spent in bed. He had had a very fairly flourishing fortnight
+in that kindest of houses and tenderest of cares and genialest of
+companies--and then repaid it all by making himself a burden and a bore.
+I got myself out of the way as soon as possible--by scrambling back
+here; and yet, all inconsequently, I think it likely I shall return
+there in March to perform the same evolution. In the intervals I quite
+take notice--but at a given moment everything temporarily goes. I come
+up again and quite well up--as how can I not in order again to re-taste
+the bitter cup? But here I am "reporting of myself" with a
+vengeance--forgive me if it's too dreary. When all's said and done it
+will eventually--the whole case--become less so. Meanwhile, too, for my
+consolation, I have picked up here and there wind-borne _bribes_, of a
+more or less authentic savour, from your own groaning board; and my poor
+old imagination does me in these days no better service than by enabling
+me to hover, like a too-participant larbin, behind your Louis XIV chair
+(if it isn't, your chair, Louis Quatorze, at least your larbin takes it
+so.) I gather you've been able to drive the spirited pen without
+cataclysms.... I take unutterable comfort in the thought that two or
+three months hence you'll probably be seated on the high-piled and
+_done_ book--in the magnificent authority of the position, even as
+Catherine II on the throne of the Czars. (Forgive the implications of
+the comparison!) Work seems far from _me_ yet--though perhaps a few
+inches nearer. A report even reaches me to the effect that there's a
+possibility of your deciding ... to come over and spend the summer at
+the Mount, and this is above all a word to say that in case you should
+do so at all betimes you will probably still see me here; as though I
+have taken my passage for England my date is only the 14th June.
+Therefore should you come May 1st--well, Porphyro grows faint! I yearn
+over this--since if you shouldn't come then (and yet should be coming at
+all,) heaven knows when we shall meet again. There are enormous reasons
+for my staying here till then, and enormous ones against my staying
+longer.
+
+Such, dearest Edith, is my meagre budget--forgive me if it isn't
+brighter and richer. I am but _just_ pulling through--and I am doing
+_that_, but no more, and so, you see, have no wild graces or wavy
+tendrils left over for the image I project. I shall try to _grow_ some
+again, little by little; but for the present am as ungarnished in every
+way as an aged plucked fowl before the cook has dealt with him. May the
+great Chef see his way to serve me up to you some day in some better
+sauce! As I am, at any rate, share me generously with your I am sure not
+infrequent commensaux ... and ask them to make the best of me (an' they
+love me--as I love _them_) even if you give them only the drumsticks and
+keep the comparatively tender, though much shrivelled, if once mighty,
+"pinion" for yourself ... I saw no one of the least "real fascination"
+(_excusez du peu_ of the conception!) in N.Y.--but the place relieved
+and beguiled me--so long as I was _debout_--and Mary Cadwal and Beatrix
+were as tenderest nursing mother and bonniest soeur de lait to me the
+whole day long. I really think I shall take--shall risk--another go of
+it before long again, and even snatch a "bite" of Washington (Washington
+pie, as we used to say,) to which latter the dear H. Whites have most
+kindly challenged me. Well, such, dearest Edith, are the short and
+simple annals of the poor! I hang about you, however inarticulately, de
+toutes les forces de mon etre and am always your fondly faithful old
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Rhoda Broughton._
+
+
+/*
+95 Irving Street,
+Cambridge, Mass.
+February 25th, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Rhoda Broughton,
+*/
+
+I hate, and have hated all along, the accumulation of silence and
+darkness in the once so bright and animated air of our ancient
+commerce--that is our old and so truly valid friendship; and I am
+irresistibly moved to strike a fresh light, as it were, and sound a
+hearty call--so that the uncanny spell may break (working, as it has
+done, so much by my own fault, or my great infirmity.) I have just had a
+letter from dear Mary Clarke, not overflowing with any particularly
+blest tidings, and containing, as an especial note of the minor key, an
+allusion to your apparently aggravated state of health and rather
+captive condition. This has caused a very sharp pang in my battered
+breast--for steadily battered I have myself been, battered all round and
+altogether, these long months and months past: even if not to the
+complete extinction of a tender sense for the woes of others.
+
+...I tell you my sorry tale, please believe me, not to harrow you up or
+"work upon" you--under the harrow as you have yourself been so cruelly
+condemned to sit; but only because when one has been long useless and
+speechless and graceless, and when one's poor powers then again begin to
+reach out for exercise, one immensely wants a few persons to know that
+one hasn't been basely indifferent or unaware, but simply gagged, so to
+speak, and laid low--simply helpless and reduced to naught. And then my
+desire has been great to talk with you, and I even feel that I am doing
+so a little through this pale and limping substitute--and such are some
+of the cheerful points I should infallibly have made _had_ I been--or
+were I just now--face to face with you. Heaven speed the day for some
+occasion more _like_ that larger and braver contact than these
+ineffectual accents. Such are the prayers with which I beguile the
+tedium of vast wastes of homesickness here--where, frankly, the sense of
+aching exile attends me the live-long day, and resists even the dazzle
+of such days as these particular ones happen to be--a glory of golden
+sunshine and air both crisp and soft, that pours itself out in unstinted
+floods and would transfigure and embellish the American scene to my
+jaundiced eye if anything _could_. But better fifty years of
+fogland--where indeed I have, alas, almost _had_ my fifty years!
+However, count on me to at least _try_ to put in a few more.
+
+...I hear from Howard Sturgis, and I hear, that is _have_ heard from W.
+E. Norris; but so have you, doubtless, oftener and more cheeringly than
+I: all such communications seem to me today in the very minor key
+indeed--in which respect they match my own (you at least will say!) But
+I don't dream of your "answering" this--it pretends to all the purity of
+absolutely disinterested affection. I only wish I could fold up in it
+some faint reflection of the flood of golden winter sunshine, some
+breath of the still, mild, already vernal air that wraps me about here
+(as I just mentioned,) while I write, and reminds me that grim and prim
+Boston is after all in the latitude of Rome--though indeed only to mock
+at the aching impatience of your all faithful, forth-reaching old
+friend,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To H. G. Wells._
+
+
+/*
+95 Irving Street,
+Cambridge, Mass.
+March 3rd, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Wells,
+*/
+
+I seem to have had notice from my housekeeper at Rye that you have very
+kindly sent me there a copy of the New Machiavelli--which she has
+forborne to forward me to these tariff-guarded shores; in obedience to
+my general instructions. But this needn't prevent me from thanking you
+for the generous gift, which will keep company with a brave row of other
+such valued signs of your remembrance at Lamb House; thanking you all
+the more too that I hadn't waited for gift or guerdon to fall on you and
+devour you, but have just lately been finding the American issue of your
+wondrous book a sufficient occasion for that. Thus it is that I can't
+rest longer till I make you some small sign at last of my conscious
+indebtedness.
+
+I have read you then, I need scarcely tell you, with an intensified
+sense of that life and force and temperament, that fulness of endowment
+and easy impudence of genius, which makes you extraordinary and which
+have long claimed my unstinted admiration: you being for me so much the
+most interesting and masterful prose-painter of your English generation
+(or indeed of your generation unqualified) that I see you hang there
+over the subject scene practically all alone; a far-flaring even though
+turbid and smoky lamp, projecting the most vivid and splendid golden
+splotches, _creating_ them about the field--shining scattered
+innumerable morsels of a huge smashed mirror. I seem to feel that there
+can be no better proof of your great gift--_The N.M._ makes me most
+particularly feel it--than that you bedevil and coerce to the extent
+you do such a reader and victim as I am, I mean one so engaged on the
+side of ways and attempts to which yours are extremely alien, and for
+whom the great interest of the art we practise involves a lot of
+considerations and preoccupations over which you more and more ride
+roughshod and triumphant--when you don't, that is, with a strange and
+brilliant impunity of your own, leave them to one side altogether (which
+_is_ indeed what you now apparently incline most to do.) Your big
+feeling for life, your capacity for chewing up the thickness of the
+world in such enormous mouthfuls, while you fairly slobber, so to speak,
+with the multitudinous taste--this constitutes for me a rare and
+wonderful and admirable exhibition, on your part, in itself, so that one
+should doubtless frankly ask one's self what the devil, in the way of
+effect and evocation and general demonic activity, one wants more. Well,
+I am willing for to-day to let it stand at that; the whole of the
+earlier part of the book, or the first half, is so alive and
+kicking--and sprawling!--so vivid and rich and strong--above all so
+_amusing_ (in the high sense of the word,) and I make remonstrance--for
+I do remonstrate--bear upon the bad service you have done your cause by
+riding so hard again that accurst autobiographic form which puts a
+premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap and the easy. Save in
+the fantastic and the romantic (Copperfield, Jane Eyre, that charming
+thing of Stevenson's with the bad title--"Kidnapped"?) it has no
+authority, no persuasive or convincing force--its grasp of reality and
+truth isn't strong and disinterested. R. Crusoe, e.g., isn't a novel at
+all. There is, to my vision, no authentic, and no really interesting and
+no _beautiful_, report of things on the novelist's, the painter's part
+unless a particular detachment has operated, unless the great stewpot or
+crucible of the imagination, of the observant and recording and
+interpreting mind in short, has intervened and played its part--and
+this detachment, this chemical transmutation for the aesthetic, the
+representational, end is terribly wanting in autobiography brought, as
+the horrible phrase is, up to date. That's my main "criticism" on the
+_N.M._--and on the whole ground there would be a hundred things more to
+say. It's accurst that I am not near enough to you to say them in less
+floundering fashion than this--but give me time (I return to England in
+June, never again, D.V., to leave it--surprise Mr. Remington thereby as
+I may!) and we will jaw as far as you will keep me company. Meanwhile I
+don't _want_ to send across the wintry sea anything but my expressed
+gratitude for the immense impressionistic and speculative wealth and
+variety of your book. Yours, my dear Wells, ever,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+P.S. I think the exhibition of "Love" as "Love"--functional Love--always
+suffers from a certain inevitable and insurmountable flat-footedness
+(for the reader's nerves etc.;) which is only to be counterplotted by
+roundabout arts--as by tracing it through indirectness and tortuosities
+of application and effect--to keep it somehow interesting and productive
+(though I don't mean _re_productive!) But this again is a big subject.
+
+_P.S. 2._ I am like your hero's forsaken wife: I know _having_ things
+(the things of life, history, the world) only as, and by _keeping_ them.
+So, and so only, I _do_ have them!
+
+
+
+
+_To C. E. Wheeler._
+
+/#
+ "The Outcry" had not appeared on the stage, but was shortly to be
+ published in the form of a narrative. The following refers to a
+ suggestion, not carried further at this time, that the play might
+ be performed by the Stage Society.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 East Eleventh Street,
+New York City.
+April 9th, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Christopher Wheeler,
+*/
+
+I am _not_ back in England, as you see, and shall not be till toward the
+end of June. I have _almost_ recovered from the very compromised state
+in which my long illness of last year left me, but not absolutely and
+wholly. I am, however, in a very much better way, and the rest is a
+question of more or less further patience and prudence. About the
+"Outcry," in the light of your plan, I am afraid that the moment isn't
+favourable for me to discuss or decide. I have made a disposition, a
+"literary use," of that work (so as not to have to view it as merely
+wasted labour on the one hand and not sickeningly to hawk it about on
+the other) which isn't propitious to any other _present_ dealing with
+it--though it might not (in fact certainly wouldn't) [be unfavourable]
+to some eventual theatrical life for it. Before I do anything else I
+must first see what shall come of the application I have made of my
+play. This, you see, is a practically unhelpful answer to your
+interesting inquiry, and I am sorry the actual situation so limits the
+matter. I rejoice in your continued interest in the theatrical question,
+and I dare say your idea as to a repertory effort on the lines you
+mention is a thing of light and life. But I have little heart or
+judgment left, as I grow older, for the mere _theatrical_ mystery: the
+drama interests me as much as ever, but I see the theatre-experiment of
+this, that or the other supposedly enlightened kind prove, all round me,
+so abysmally futile and fallacious and treacherous that I am practically
+quite "off" from it and can but let it pass. Pardon my weary
+cynicism--and try me again later. The conditions--the theatre-question
+generally--in this country are horrific and unspeakable--utter, and so
+far as I can see irreclaimable, barbarism reigns. The anomalous fact is
+that the theatre, so called, can flourish in barbarism, but that any
+_drama_ worth speaking of can develop but in the air of civilization.
+However, keep tight hold of your clue and believe me yours ever,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Dr. J. William White._
+
+
+/*
+95 Irving Street,
+Cambridge, Mass.
+May 12th, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear J. William,
+*/
+
+I have from far back so dragged you, and the gentle Letitia even, not
+less, through the deep dark desperate discipline of my unmatched genius
+for not being quick on the epistolary trigger, that, with such a
+perfection of schooling--quite my prize pupils and little show
+performers in short--I can be certain that you won't so much as have
+turned a hair under my recent probably unsurpassed exhibitions of it.
+Nevertheless I shall expect you to sit up and look bright and gratified
+(even quite intelligent--like true heads of the class) now that I do
+write and reward your exemplary patience and beautiful drill. Yes, dear
+prize pupils, I feel I can fully depend on you to regard the present as
+a "regular answer" to your sweet letter from Bermuda; or to behave,
+beautifully, as if you _did_--which comes to the same thing. Above all I
+can trust you to believe that if _your_ discipline has been stiff, that
+of your battered and tattered old disciplinarian himself has been
+stiffer--incessant and uninterrupted and really not leaving him a
+moment's attention for anything else. He is still very limp and
+bewildered with it all--yet with a gleam of better things ahead, that
+after his dire and interminable ordeal, and though the gleam has but
+just broken out, causes him to turn to you again with that fond fidelity
+which enjoyed its liveliest expression, in the ancient past, on the day,
+never to be forgotten, when we had such an affectionate scuffle to get
+ahead of each other in making a joyous bonfire of Lamb House in honour
+of your so acclaimed arrival there: Letitia sitting by, with her
+impartial smile, as the queen of beauty at a Tournament. (She will
+remember how she crowned the victor--I modestly forbear to name him: and
+what a ruinously--to _him_--genial _feu de joie_ resulted from the
+expensive application of my brandished torch.) Well, the upshot of it
+all is that I have put off my sailing by the Mauretania of June
+14th--but not alas to your Olympic, vessel of the gods, evidently, later
+that month. I have shifted to the same Mauretania of August 2nd--urgent
+and intimate family reasons making for my stop-over till then. So when I
+see you in England, as I fondly count on doing after this dismal
+interlude, it will be during the delightful weeks you will spend there
+in the autumn, when all your athletic laurels have been gathered, all
+your high-class hotels checked off, all your obedient servants (except
+me!) tipped, and all your portentous drafts honoured. Let us plot out
+those sweet September days a little even now--let _me_ at least dream of
+them as a supreme test, proof and consecration, of what returning health
+will once more enable me to stand. I am too unutterably glad to be going
+back even with a further delay--I am wasted to a shadow (even though
+the shadow of a still formidable mass) by homesickness (for the home I
+once had--before we applied the match. You see the loss for you
+_now_--by the way: if you had only allowed it to stand!) I have taken
+places in the Reform Gallery "for the coronation"--and won them by
+ballot--for the second procession: and now palmed them off on two of my
+female victims--after _such_ a quandary in the choice! Apropos of
+coronations and such-like, won't you, when you write, very kindly give
+me some news of the dear dashing Abbeys, long lost to sight and sound of
+me? It has come round to me in vague ways that they have at last
+actually left Morgan Hall for some newly-acquired princely estate: do
+you know where and what the place is? A gentle word on this head would
+immensely assuage my curiosity. Where-ever and whatever it is, let us
+stay there together next September! You see therefore how practical my
+demand is. Of course Ned will paint this coronation too--while his hand
+is in. And oh you should be here now to share a holy rage with me....
+Such is this babyish democracy.
+
+Ever your grand, yet attached old aristocrat,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To T. Bailey Sanders._
+
+
+/*
+Barack-Matiff Farm,
+Salisbury, Conn.
+May 27, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Bailey,
+*/
+
+It greatly touches and gratifies me to hear from you--even though I have
+to inflict on you the wound of a small announced (positively last)
+postponement of my re-appearance. I _like_ to think that you may be a
+little wounded--wanton as that declaration sounds; for it gives me the
+measure of my being cared for in poor dear old distracted England--than
+which there can be no sweeter or more healing sense to my bruised and
+aching and oh so nostalgic soul.... I am exceedingly better in health, I
+thank the "powers"--and even presume to figure it out that I shall next
+slip between the soft swing-doors of Athene in the character of a
+confirmed improver, struggler upward, or even bay-crowned victor over
+ills. Don't lament my small procrastination--a matter of only six weeks;
+for I shall then still better know where and how I am. I am at the
+present hour (more literally) staying with some amiable cousins, of the
+more amiable sex--supposedly at least (my supposition is not about the
+cousins, but about the sex)--in the deep warm heart of "New England at
+its best." This large Connecticut scenery of mountain and broad vale,
+recurrent great lake and splendid river (the great Connecticut itself,
+the Housatonic, the Farmington,) all embowered with truly prodigious
+elms and maples, is very noble and charming and sympathetic, and
+made--on its great scale of extent--to be dealt with by the blest
+motor-car, the consolation of my declining years. This luxury I am
+charitably much treated to, and it does me a world of good. The
+enormous, the unique ubiquity of the "auto" here suggests many
+reflections--but I can't go into these now, or into any branch of the
+prodigious economic or "sociological" side of this unspeakable and
+amazing country; I must keep such matters to regale you withal in poor
+dear little Lamb House garden; for one brick of the old battered purple
+wall of which I would give at this instant (home-sick quand meme) the
+whole bristling state of Connecticut. I shall "stay about" till I
+embark--that may represent to you my temperamental or other gain.
+However, you must autobiographically regale me not a bit less than
+yours, my dear Bailey, all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Sir T. H. Warren._
+
+/#
+ The following letter to the President of Magdalen refers to the
+ offer of an honorary degree at Oxford, subsequently conferred in
+ 1912.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Salisbury, Connecticut.
+May 29th, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear President,
+*/
+
+I was more sorry than I can say to have to cable you last evening in
+that disabled sense. I had some time ago taken my return passage to
+England for June 14th, but more lately the President of Harvard was so
+good as to invite me to receive an Honorary Degree at their hands on the
+28th of that month--the same day as your Encaenia. Urgent and intimate
+family reasons conspired to make a delay advisable; so I accepted the
+Harvard invitation and have shifted my departure to August 2nd.
+
+Behold me thus committed to Harvard--and unable moreover at this season
+of the multitudinous (I mean of the rush to Europe) to get a decent
+berth on an outward ship even were I to try. The formal document from
+the University arrived with your kind letter--proposing to me the Degree
+of Doctor of Letters, as your letter mentions; and quickened my great
+regret at being thus perversely prevented from embracing an occasion the
+appeal of which I might so have connected with your benevolence.
+
+I should feel an Oxford degree a very great honour and a great
+consideration, and I am writing of course to the Registrar of the
+University. I rejoice to be going back at last to a more immediate--or
+more possible--sight and sound of you and of all your surrounding
+amenities and glories. Yet I wish too I could open to you for a few days
+the impression of the things about me here; in the warm, the very warm,
+heart of "New England at its best," such a vast abounding Arcadia of
+mountains and broad vales and great rivers and large lakes and white
+villages embowered in prodigious elms and maples. It is extraordinarily
+beautiful and graceful and idyllic--for America....
+
+I am very sincerely and faithfully and gratefully yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Ellen Emmet._
+
+/#
+ Mrs. George Hunter and her daughters had been H. J.'s hostesses at
+ Salisbury, Connecticut, in the preceding May.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+Aug. 15th, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+Beloved dearest darling Bay!
+*/
+
+Your so beautifully human letter of Aug. 1st reaches me here this a.m.
+through Harry--who appears to have picked it out of perdition at the
+Belmont after I had sailed (at peep of dawn) on Aug. 2nd. It deeply and
+exquisitely touches me--so bowed down under the shame of my long silence
+to all your House, to your splendid mother in particular, have I
+remained ever since the day I brought my little visit to you to a heated
+close--which sounds absurdly as if I had left you in a rage after a
+violent discussion. But you will know too well what I mean and how the
+appalling summer that was even then beginning so actively to cook for us
+could only prove a well-nigh fatal dish to your aged and infirm uncle.
+I met the full force of this awful and almost (to the moment I sailed)
+unbroken visitation just after leaving you--and, frankly, it simply
+demoralized me and flattened me out. Manners, memories, decencies, all
+alike fell from me and I simply lay for long weeks a senseless,
+stricken, perspiring, inconsiderate, unclothed mass. I expected and
+desired nothing but to melt utterly away--and could only treat my
+nearest and dearest as if _they_ expected and desired no more. I am
+convinced that you all didn't and that you noticed not at all that I had
+become a most ungracious and uncommunicative recipient of your bounty. I
+lived from day to day, most of the time in my bath, and please tell your
+mother that when I thought of you it was to say to myself, "oh, they're
+all up to their necks together in their Foxhunter spring, and it would
+be really indiscreet to break in upon them!" That is how I do trust you
+have mainly spent your time--though in your letter you're too delicate
+to mention it. I was caught as in two or three firetraps--I mean places
+of great and special suffering, as during a week at the terrific
+Intervale, N.H., from July 1st to 8th or so (with the kind Merrimans,
+themselves Salamanders, who served me nothing but hot food and expected
+clothing;) but I found a blest refuge betimes with my kind old friend
+George James (widower of Lily Lodge,) at the tip end of the Nahant
+promontory, quite out at sea, where, amid gardens and groves and on a
+vast breezy verandah, my life was most mercifully saved and where I
+stuck fast till the very eve of my sailing.... I got back _here_,
+myself, with a great sense that it was, quite desperately, high time;
+though, alas, I came upon the same brassy sky and red-hot air here as I
+left behind me--it has been as formidable a summer here as in the U.S.
+Everything is scorched and blighted--my garden a thing almost of
+cinders. There has been no rain for weeks and weeks, the thermometer is
+mostly at 90, and still it goes on. (90 in this thick English air is
+like 100 with us.) The like was never seen, and famine-threatening
+strikes (at London and Liverpool docks,) with wars and rumours of wars
+and the smash of the House of Lords and, as many people hold, of the
+constitution, complete the picture of a distracted and afflicted
+country. Nevertheless I shouldn't mind it so much if we could only have
+rain. _Then_ I think all troubles would end, or mend--and at least I
+should begin to find myself again. I can't do so yet, and am waiting to
+see how and where I am.
+
+I directed Notman, of Boston, to send you a photograph of a little
+old--ever so ancient--ambrotype lent me by Lilla Perry to have
+copied--her husband T.S.P. having been in obscure possession of it for
+half a century. It will at least show you where and how I was in about
+my 16th year. I strike myself as such a sweet little thing that I want
+you, and your mother, to see it in order to believe it--though she will
+believe it more easily than you. It looks even a great deal like _her_
+about that time too--we were always thought to look a little alike....
+My journey (voyage) out on the big smooth swift Mauretania gave me, and
+has left me with, such a sense as of a few hours' pampered _ferry_,
+making a mere mouthful of the waste of waters, that I kind of promise
+myself to come back "all the time." I had never been so blandly just
+lifted across. Tell your mother and Rosina and Leslie that I just
+cherish and adore them all. I cling to the memory of all those lovely
+motor-hours; tell Leslie in particular how dear I hold the remembrance
+of our run together to Stockbridge and Emily T.'s that wonderful long
+day. And I had the sweetest passages with great Rosina. But I fold you
+all together in my arms, with Grenville, please, well in the thick of
+it, and am, darling Bay, your most faithfully fond old
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Howard Sturgis._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+August 17th, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+Beloved creature!
+*/
+
+As if I hadn't mainly spent my time since my return here (a week ago
+yesterday) in writhing and squirming for very shame at having left your
+several, or at least your generously two or three last, exquisite
+outpourings unanswered. But I had long before sailing from la-bas,
+dearest Howard, and especially during the final throes and exhaustions,
+been utterly overturned by the savage heat and drought of a summer that
+had set in furiously the very last of May, going crescendo all that
+time--and of which I am finding here (so far as the sky of brass and the
+earth of cinders is concerned) so admirable an imitation. I have shown
+you often enough, I think, how much more I have in me of the polar bear
+than of the salamander--and in fine, at the time I last heard from you,
+pen, ink and paper had dropped from my perspiring grasp (though while
+_in_ the grasp they had never felt more adhesively sticky,) and I had
+become a mere prostrate, panting, liquefying mass, wailing to be
+removed. I _was_ removed--at the date I mention--pressing your supreme
+benediction (in the form of eight sheets of lovely "stamped paper," as
+they say in the U.S.) to my heaving bosom; but only to less sustaining
+and refreshing conditions than I had hoped for here. You will understand
+how some of these--in this seamed and cracked and blasted and distracted
+country--strike me; and perhaps even a little how I seem to myself to
+have been transferred simply from one sizzling grid-iron to another--at
+a time when my further toleration of grid-irons had reached its lowest
+ebb. _Such_ a pile of waiting letters greeted me here--most of them
+pushing in with an indecency of clamour before _your_ dear delicate
+signal. But it is always of you, dear and delicate and supremely
+interesting, that I have been thinking, and here is just a poor
+palpitating stopgap of a reply. Don't take it amiss of my wise affection
+if I tell you that I am heartily glad you are going to Scotland. Go,
+_go_, and stay as long as you ever can--it's the sort of thing exactly
+that will do you a world of good. I am to go there, I believe, next
+month, to stay four or five days with John Cadwalader--and eke with
+Minnie of that ilk (or more or less,) in Forfarshire--but that will
+probably be lateish in the month; and before I go you will have come
+back from the Eshers and I have returned from a visit of a few days
+which I expect to embark upon on Saturday next. Then, when we are
+gathered in, no power on earth will prevent me from throwing myself on
+your bosom. Forgive meanwhile the vulgar sufficiency and banality of my
+advice, above, as to what will "do you good"--loathsome expression! But
+one grasps in one's haste the cheapest current coin. I commend myself
+strongly to the gentlest (no, that's not the word--say the firmest even
+while the fairest) of Williams, and am yours, dearest Howard, ever so
+yearningly,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+P.S. I don't know of course in the least what Esher's "operation" may
+have been--but I hope not very grave and that he is coming round from
+it. I should like to be very kindly remembered to _her_--who shines to
+me, from far back, in so amiable a light....
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. William James._
+
+
+/*
+Hill, Theydon Mount, Epping.
+August 27th, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Alice,
+*/
+
+I want to write you while I am here--and it helps me (thus putting pen
+to paper does) to conjure away the darkness of this black
+anniversary--just a little. I have been dreading this day--as I have
+been living through this week, as you and Peg will have done, and Bill
+not less, under the shadow of all the memories and pangs of a year
+ago--but there is a strange (strange enough!) kind of weak anodyne of
+association in doing so here, where thanks to your support and
+unspeakable charity, utterly and entirely, I got sufficiently better of
+my own then deadly visitation of misery to struggle with you on to
+Nauheim. I met here at first on coming down a week--nine days--ago
+(quite fleeing from the hot and blighted Rye) the assault of all that
+miserable and yet in a way helpful vision--but have since been very glad
+I came, just as I am glad that you were here then--in spite of
+everything.... I am adding day to day here, as you see--partly because
+it helps to tide me over a bad--not _physically_ bad--time, and partly
+because my admirable and more than ever wonderful hostess puts it so as
+a favour to her that I do, that I can only oblige her in memory of all
+her great goodness to us--when it _did_ make such a difference--of May
+1910. So I daresay I shall stay on for ten or twelve days more (I don't
+want to stir, for one thing, till we have had some relief by _water_. It
+has now rained in some places, but there has fallen as yet no drop here
+or hereabouts--and the earth is sickening to behold.) I have my old
+room--and I have paid a visit to yours--which is empty.... Mrs.
+Swynnerton is doing an historical picture for a decorative
+competition--the embellishment of the Chelsea Town Hall, I believe:
+Queen Elizabeth taking refuge (at Chelsea) under an oak during a
+thunder-storm, and she finds the great oak here and Mrs. Hunter, in a
+wonderful Tudor dress and headgear and red wig, to be admirably, though
+too beautifully, the Queen: with the big canvas set up, out of doors, by
+the tree, where her marvellous model still finds time, on top of
+everything, to _pose_, hooped and ruffled and decorated, and in a most
+trying queenly position. Mrs. S. is also doing--finishing--the portrait
+of me that she pushed on so last year.
+
+...But goodbye, dearest Alice, dearest all. I hope your Mother is with
+you and that Harry has begun to take his holiday--bless him. I bless
+your Mother too and send her my affectionate love. Goodbye, dearest
+Alice. Your all faithful
+
+/*
+HENRY.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. John L. Gardner._
+
+
+/*
+Hill, Theydon Mount, Epping.
+September 3rd, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Isabella Gardner,
+*/
+
+Yes, it has been abominable, my silence since I last heard from you--so
+kindly and beautifully and touchingly--during those few last flurried
+and worried days before I left America. They were very difficult, they
+were very deadly days: I was ill with the heat and the tension and the
+trouble, and, amid all the things to be done for the wind-up of a year's
+stay, I allowed myself to defer the great pleasure of answering you, yet
+the general pain of taking leave of you, to some such supposedly calmer
+hour as this.... I fled away from my little south coast habitation a
+very few days after reaching it--by reason of the brassy sky, the
+shadeless glare and the baked and barren earth, and took refuge among
+these supposedly dense shades--yet where also all summer no drop of rain
+has fallen. There is less of a glare nevertheless, and more of the
+cooling motor-car, and a very vast and beautiful old William and Mary
+(and older) house of a very interesting and delightful character, which
+has lately come into possession of an admirable friend of mine, Mrs.
+Charles Hunter, who tells me that she happily knows you and that you
+were very kind and helpful to her during a short visit she made a few
+(or several) years ago to America. It is a splendid old house--and
+though, in the midst of Epping Forest, it is but a ninety minutes'
+motor-ride from London, it's as sequestered and woodlanded as if it were
+much deeper in the country. And there are innumerable other interesting
+old places about, and such old-world nooks and corners and felicities as
+make one feel (in the thick of revolution) that anything that
+"happens"--happens disturbingly--to this wonderful little attaching old
+England, the ripest fruit of time, can only be a change for the worse.
+Even the North Shore and its rich wild beauty fades by comparison--even
+East Gloucester and Cecilia's clamorous little bower make a less
+exquisite harmony. Nevertheless, I think tenderly even of that bustling
+desert now--such is the magic of fond association. George James's
+shelter of me in his seaward fastness during those else insufferable
+weeks was a mercy I can never forget, and my beautiful day with you from
+Lynn on and on, to the lovely climax above-mentioned, is a cherished
+treasure of memory. I water this last sweet withered flower in
+particular with tears of regret--that we mightn't have had more of them.
+I hope your month of August has gone gently and reasonably and that you
+have continued to be able to put it in by the sea. I found the salt
+breath of that element gave the only savour--or the main one--that my
+consciousness knew at those bad times; and if you cultivated it duly and
+cultivated sweet peace, into the bargain, as hard as ever you could,
+I'll engage that you're better now--and will continue so if you'll only
+really take your unassailable _stand_ on sweet peace. You will find in
+the depth of your admirable nature more genius and vocation for it than
+you have ever let yourself find out--and I hereby give you my blessing
+on your now splendid exploitation of that hitherto least attended-to of
+your many gardens. Become rich in indifference--to almost everything but
+your fondly faithful old
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+/#
+ By "Her" is meant Mrs. Wharton's motor, always referred to by the
+ chauffeur as "she."
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+Sept. 27th, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Edith,
+*/
+
+Alas it is not possible--it is not even for a moment thinkable. I
+returned, practically, but last night to my long-abandoned home, where
+every earthly consideration, and every desire of my heart, conspires now
+to fix me in some sort of recovered peace and stability; I cling to its
+very doorposts, for which I have yearned for long months, and the idea
+of going forth again on new and distant and expensive adventure fills me
+with--let me frankly say--absolute terror and dismay--the desire, the
+frantic impulse of scared childhood, to plunge my head under the
+bedclothes and burrow there, not to "let it (i.e. _Her_!) get me!" In
+fine I _want_ as little to renew the junketings and squanderings of
+exile--_time_, priceless time-squanderings as they are for me now--as I
+want devoutly much to do something very different, to which I must begin
+immediately to address myself--and even if my desire were intense indeed
+there would be gross difficulties for me to overcome. But enough--don't
+let me pile up the agony of the ungracious--as any failure of response
+to a magnificent invitation can only be. Let me simply gape all
+admiringly, from a distance, at the splendour of your own spirit and
+general resources--or rather let me just simply stay my pen and hide my
+head (under the bedclothes before-mentioned.) My finest deepest sense of
+the general matter is that the whole economy of my future (in which I
+see myself reviving again to certain things, very definite things, that
+I want to do) absolutely lays an interdict (to which I oh so fondly
+bow!) on my _ever_ leaving these shores again. And I have no scruple of
+saying this to you--your beautiful genius being so for great
+globe-adventures and putting girdles round the earth. Mine is,
+incomparably, for brooding like the Hen, whom I differ from but by a
+syllable in designation; and see how little I personally lose by it,
+since your putting on girdles so quite inevitably involves your passing
+at a given moment where I can reach forth and grab you a little. Don't
+despise me for a spiritless worm, only _livrez-vous-y_ yourself ... with
+all pride and power, and unroll the rich record later to your so
+inevitably deprived (though so basely resigned) and always so faithfully
+fond old
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+Oct. 2nd, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear incomparable Child!
+*/
+
+What is one to do, how is your poor old battered and tattered
+ex-neighbour above all to demean himself in the glittering presence of
+such a letter? Yes, I _have_--through the force of dire
+accidents--treated you to the most confused and aching void that could
+pretend to pass for the mere ghost of conversability, and yet you shine
+upon me still with your own sole light--the absolute dazzle of which
+very naturally brings tears to my eyes. You are a monster--or
+almost!--of magnanimity, as well as beauty and ability and (above all,
+clearly) of felicity, and there is nothing for me, I quite recognise,
+but to collapse and grovel. Behold me before you worm-like therefore--a
+pretty ponderous worm, but still capable of the quiver of sensibility
+and quite inoffensively transportable--whether by motor-car or train, or
+the local, frugal fly. There is an almost incredible kindness for me in
+your and Wilfred's being prepared literally to harbour and nourish, to
+exhibit on your bright scene, publicly and all incongruously, so aged
+and dingy a parasite; but a real big breezy happiness sometimes begets,
+I know, a regular wantonness of charity, a fond extravagance of
+altruism, and I surrender myself to the wild experiment with the very
+most pious hope that you won't repent of it. You shall not at any point,
+I promise you, if the effort on my part decently to grace the splendid
+situation can possibly stave it off. I will bravely come then on Friday
+27th--arriving, in the afternoon, by any conveyance that you are so good
+as to instruct me to adopt. And even as the earthworm might
+aspire--occasion offering--to mate with the silkworm, I will gladly
+arrange with dear glossy Howard to present myself if possible in _his_
+company. I rejoice in your offering me that cherished company, there is
+a rare felicity in it: for Howard is the person in all the world who is
+kindest to me _next after you_. I shall rejoice to see Wilfred again,
+and be particularly delighted to see him as my host; our acquaintance
+began a long time ago, but seemed till now to have been blighted by
+adversity. This splendidly makes up--and all the good I thought of him
+is confirmed for me by his thinking so much good of you. It will thrill
+me likewise to see your bower of bliss--a _fester Burg_ in a distracted
+world just now, and where I pray that good understandings shall ever
+hold their own. It mustn't be difficult to be happy with you and by you,
+dear Clare, and you will see how I, for my permitted part, shall pull it
+off. I was lately very happy in Scotland--happy for _me_, and for
+Scotland!--and it must have been something to do with the fact that (I
+being in Forfarshire) you were, or were even about to be, though unknown
+to me, in the neighbouring county. This created an atmosphere--over and
+above the bonny Scotch; I kind of sniffed your great geniality--from
+afar; so you see the kind of good you can't help doing me. It's rapture
+to think that you'll do me yet more--at closer quarters, and I am yours,
+my dear Clare, all affectionately,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Alice Runnells._
+
+/#
+ H. J.'s nephew William, his brother's second son, had just become
+ engaged to Miss Runnells.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+Oct. 4th, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+My very dear Niece,
+*/
+
+I must tell you at once all the pleasure your beautiful and generous
+letter of the 23rd September has given me. It's a genuine joy to have
+from you so straight the delightful truth of the whole matter, and I
+can't thank you enough for talking to me with an exquisite young
+confidence and treating me as the fond and faithful and intensely
+participating old uncle that I want to be. It makes me feel--all you
+say--how right I've been to be glad, and how righter still I shall be to
+be myself confident. How shall I tell you in return what an interest I
+am going to take in you--and how I want you to multiply for me the
+occasions of showing it? You see I take the greatest and tenderest
+interest in Bill--and you and I feel then exactly together about that.
+We shall do--always more or less together!--everything we can think of
+to help him and back him up, and we shall find nothing more interesting
+and more paying. I expect somehow or other to see a great deal of
+him--and of you; and count on you to bring him out to me on the very
+first pretext, and on him to bring you. He is splendidly serious and
+_entier_; it's a great thing to be as _entier_ as that. And he has great
+ability, great possibilities, which will take, and so much reward, all
+the bringing out and wooing forth and caring and looking out for that we
+can give them--as faith and affection can do these things; though of a
+certainty they would go their own way in spite of us--the fine powers
+would--if, unluckily for us, they _didn't_ appeal to us. I like to
+think of you working out your ideas--planning all those possibilities
+together--in the wondrous Chocorua October--where I hope you are staying
+to the end--and even if intensity at the studio naturally suffers for
+the time it has only fallen back a little to gather again for the
+spring. I mean in particular the intensity of which you were the subject
+and centre, and which must have at first been somewhat hampered by its
+own very excess. Bill's only danger is in his tendency to be intensely
+intense--which is a bit of a waste; if one _is_ intense (and it's the
+only thing for an artist to be) one should be economically, that is
+carelessly and cynically so: in that way one limits the conditions and
+tangles of one's problem. But don't give Bill this for a specimen of the
+way you and I are going to pull him through: we shall do much better
+yet--only it's past, far past, midnight and the deep hush of the little
+old sleeping town suggests bed-time rather as the great question for the
+moment. I have come back to this admirable small corner with great joy
+and profit--and oh, dear Alice, how earnestly you are awaited here at
+some not really distant hour by your affectionate old uncle,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Frederic Harrison._
+
+/#
+ The "small fiction" sent to Mrs. Harrison was _The Outcry_.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
+Oct. 19, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Mrs. Harrison,
+*/
+
+I am more touched than I can say by your gentle and generous
+acknowledgment of the poor little sign of contrition and apology (in the
+shape of a slight offered beguilement) that referred to my graceless
+silence after the receipt of a beautiful word of sympathy in a great
+sorrow months and months ago--I am ashamed to remind you of how many!
+You now heap coals of fire, as the phrase is, on my head--and I can
+scarcely bear it, for the pure crushing sense of your goodness. I was in
+truth, at the time of your other letter, deeply submerged--at once
+horribly bereft and very ill physically, but I was really almost as much
+touched by the kindness of which yours was a part as I was either. Only
+I was unable to do anything at the time in the way of recognition--at
+the time or for a long while afterwards; and when at last I did begin to
+emerge--after a very difficult year in America which came to an end only
+two months ago, my very indebtednesses were paralysing--my long silence
+required, to my sore sense, so much explanation. However, I _have_
+little by little explained--to some friends; though I think not to those
+I count as closest--for such, one feels, are the best comprehenders,
+without one's having to tell too much.
+
+I am in town, you see--not at Rye, having gone back there definitely,
+three weeks ago, to the questionable experiment of taking up my abode
+there for the season to come. The experiment broke down--I can no longer
+stand the solitude and confinement, the _immobilisation_, of that
+contracted corner in these shortening and darkening weeks and months.
+These things have the worst effect upon me--and I fled to London
+pavements, lamplights, shopfronts, taxi's--and friends; amid all of
+which I have recovered my equilibrium excellently, and shall do so still
+more. It means definitely for me no more winters at rueful Rye--only
+summers, though I hope plenty of _them_. I go down there, however, for
+bits, to keep my small household together--I can't yet, or till I
+arrange some frugal footing, bring it up here; and I shall be delighted
+to profit by one of those occasions to seek your hospitality in a
+neighbourly way for a couple of nights. I shall be eager for this, and
+will communicate with you as soon as the opportunity seems to glimmer.
+Please express to Frederic Harrison my hearty participation, by sympathy
+and sense, in all the fine things that are now so handsomely happening
+to him; he is a splendid example and incitement (_ex_citement in fact)
+for those climbing the great hill--the hill of the long faith and the
+stout staff--just after him, and who see him so little spent and so
+erect against the sky at the top. We see you _with_ him, dear Mrs.
+Harrison, making scarcely less brave a figure--at least to your very
+faithful old friend,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+P.S. I have it at heart to mention that my small fiction was written two
+years ago--in 1909.
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Theodora Bosanquet._
+
+/#
+ On this appeal Miss Bosanquet, H. J.'s amanuensis, secured rooms
+ for him in Lawrence Street, Chelsea.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+105 Pall Mall, S.W.
+October 27th, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Miss Bosanquet,
+*/
+
+Oh if you _could_ only have the real right thing to miraculously propose
+to me, you and Miss Bradley, when I see you on Tuesday at 4.30! For you
+see, by this bolting in horror and loathing (but don't _repeat_ those
+expressions!) from Rye for the winter, my situation suddenly becomes
+special and difficult; and largely through this, that having got back to
+work and to a very particular job, the need of expressing myself, of
+pushing it on, on the old Remingtonese terms, grows daily stronger
+within me. But I haven't a seat and temple for the Remington and its
+priestess--_can't_ have here at this club, and on the other hand can't
+now organize a permanent or regular and continuous footing for the
+London winter, which means something unfurnished and taking (_wasting,
+now_) time and thought. I want a small, very cheap and very clean
+_furnished_ flat or trio of rooms etc. (like the one we talked of under
+the King's Cross delusion--only better _and_ with some, a very few,
+tables and chairs and fireplaces,) that I could hire for 2 or 3--_3 or
+4_--months to drive ahead my job in--the Remington priestess and I
+converging and meeting there morning by morning--and it being preferably
+nearer to her than to me; though near tubes and things for both of us! I
+must keep on _this_ place for food and bed etc.--I have it by the
+year--till I really _have_ something else by the year--for winter
+purposes--to supersede it (Lamb House abides, for long summers.) Your
+researches can have only been for the _un_furnished--but look, _think,
+invent_! Two or three decent little tabled and chaired and lighted rooms
+would do. I catch a train till Monday, probably late. But on Tuesday!
+
+/*
+Yours ever,
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. William James._
+
+/#
+ The book on which H. J. was now at work was _A Small Boy and
+ Others_.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+The Athenaeum, Pall Mall, S.W.
+Nov. 13th, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Alice,
+*/
+
+I must bless you on the spot for your dear letter of the 22nd--continued
+on the 31st. I clutch so at everything that concerns and emanates from
+you all that I kind of pine for the need of it all the while--or at any
+rate am immensely and positively bettered by every scrap of the dear old
+Library life that you can manage to waft over to me.... I find,
+naturally, that I can think of you all, and mingle with you so, ever so
+much more vividly than I could of old--through the effect of all those
+weeks and months of last year--which have had at any rate that happy
+result, that I have the constant image of your days and doings. You must
+think now very cheerfully and relievedly of mine--because distinctly,
+yes, dear brave old London is working my cure. The _conditions_ here
+were what I needed all the while that I was so far away from them--I
+mean because they are of the kind materially best addressed to helping
+me to work my way back to an equilibrium.... I shall see how it
+works--from 10.30 to 1.30 each day--and let you hear more; but it
+represents the yearning effort really to get, more surely and swiftly
+now, up to my neck into the book about William and the rest of us. I
+have written to Harry to ask him for certain of the young, youthful
+letters (copies of them) which I didn't bring away with me--on the other
+hand I have found some six or eight very precious ones mixed up with the
+mass of Father's that I have with me (thrust into Father's envelopes
+etc.) Of Father's, alas, very few are useable; they are so intensely
+domestic, private and personal.
+
+_November 19th._ I find with horror, dearest Alice, that I have
+inadvertently left this all these days in my portfolio (interrupted
+where I broke off above,) under the impression that I had finished and
+posted it. This is dreadful, and I am afraid shows how the beneficent
+London, for all its beneficence, does interpose, invade and distract,
+giving one too many things to do and to bear in mind at once. What
+sickened me is that I have thus kept my letter over a whole wasted
+week--so far as being in touch with you all is concerned. On the other
+hand this lapse of time enables me blessedly to confirm, in the light of
+further experience, whatever of good and hopeful the beginning of the
+present states to you....
+
+In the third place a most valued letter from Harry has come,
+accompanying a packet of more of William's letters typed, for which I
+heartily thank him, and promising me some others yet. I am writing to
+him in a very few days, and will then tell him how I am entirely at one
+with him about the kind of use to be made by me of all these early
+things, the kind of setting they must have, the kind of encompassment
+that the book, as _my_ book, my play of reminiscence and almost of
+brotherly autobiography, and filial autobiography not less, must
+enshrine them in. The book I see and feel will be difficult and
+unprecedented and perilous--but if I bring it off it will be exquisite
+and unique; bring it off as I inwardly project it and oh so devoutly
+desire it. I greatly regret only, also, the almost complete absence of
+letters from Alice. She clearly destroyed after Father's death all the
+letters she had written to _them_--him and Mother--in absence, and this
+was natural enough. But it leaves a perfect blank--though there are on
+the other hand all my own intimate memories. Could you see--ask--if
+Fanny Morse has kept any? that is just possible. She wrote after all so
+little. I marvel that _I_ have none--during the Cambridge years. But she
+was so ill that writing was rare for her--_very_ rare. However, I must
+end this. I hope the Irving St. winter wears a friendly face for you. I
+think so gratefully and kindly now of the little chintzy parlour--blest
+refuge. I re-embrace dearest Peg and I do so want some demonstration of
+what Aleck is doing. It's a pang to hear from you that he "isn't so
+well physically." What does that sadly mean? I send him all my love and
+to your mother. Ever your
+
+/*
+HENRY.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+
+/*
+Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
+Nov. 19th, 1911.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Edith,
+*/
+
+There are scarce degrees of difference in my constant need of hearing
+from you, yet when that felicity comes it manages each time to seem
+pre-eminent and to have assuaged an exceptional hunger. The pleasure and
+relief, at any rate, three days since, were of the rarest quality--and
+it's always least discouraging (for the exchange of sentiments) to know
+that your wings are for the moment folded and your field a bit
+delimited. I knew you were back in Paris as an informer passing hereby
+on his way thence again to N.Y. had seen you dining at the Ritz en
+nombreuse compagnie, "looking awfully handsome and stunningly dressed."
+And Mary Hunter cesjours-ci had given me earlier and more exotic news of
+you, yet coloured with a great vividness of sympathy and admiration....
+But I feel that it takes a hard assurance to speak to you of "arriving"
+anywhere--as that implies starting and continuing, and before your great
+heroic rushes and revolutions I can only gape and sigh and sink back. It
+requires an association of ease--with the whole heroic question (of the
+"up and doing" state)--which I don't possess, to presume to
+suggestionise on the subject of a new advent. Great will be the glory
+and joy, and the rushing to and fro, when the wide wings are able,
+marvellously, to show us symptoms of spreading again--and here I am
+(mainly here this winter) to thrill with the first announcement. London
+is better for me, during these months, than any other spot of earth, or
+of pavement; and even here I seem to find I can work--and n'ai pas
+maintenant d'autre idee. Apropos of which aid to life your remarks about
+my small latest-born are absolutely to the point. The little creature is
+absolutely of the irresistible sex of her most intelligent critic--for I
+don't pretend, like Lady Macbeth, to bring forth men-children only. You
+speak at your ease, chere Madame, of the interminable and formidable job
+of my producing a mon age another Golden Bowl--the most arduous and
+thankless task I ever set myself. However, on all that il y aurait bien
+des choses a dire; and meanwhile, I blush to say, the Outcry is on its
+way to a fifth edition (in these few weeks), whereas it has taken the
+poor old G.B. eight or nine years to get even into a third. And I should
+have to go back and live for two continuous years at Lamb House to write
+it (living on dried herbs and cold water--for "staying power"--meanwhile;)
+and that would be very bad for me, would probably indeed put an end to
+me altogether. My own sense is that I don't want, and oughtn't to try,
+to attack ever again anything longer (save for about 70 or 80 pages
+more) than the Outcry. That is deja assez difficile--the "artistic
+economy" of that inferior little product being a much more calculated
+and ciphered, much more cunning and (to use your sweet expression)
+crafty one than that of five G.B.'s. The vague verbosity of the
+Oxusflood (beau nom!) terrifies me--sates me; whereas the steel
+structure of the other form makes every parcelle a weighed and related
+value. Moreover nobody is really doing (or, ce me semble, as I look
+about, can do) Outcries, while all the world is doing G.B.'s--and
+vous-meme, chere Madame, tout le premier: which gives you really the cat
+out of the bag! My vanity forbids me (instead of the more sweetly
+consecrating it) a form in which you run me so close. Seulement alors je
+compterais batir a great many (a great many, entendezvous?)
+Outcries--and on donnees autrement rich. About this present one hangs
+the inferiority, the comparative triviality, of its primal origin. But
+pardon this flood of professional egotism. I have in any case got back
+to work--on something that now the more urgently occupies me as the time
+for me circumstantially to have done it would have been last winter,
+when I was insuperably unfit for it, and that is extremely special,
+experimental and as yet occult. I apply myself to my effort every
+morning at a little repaire in the depths of Chelsea, a couple of little
+rooms that I have secured for quiet and concentration--to which our
+blest taxi whirls me from hence every morning at 10 o'clock, and where I
+meet my amanuensis (of the days of the composition of the G.B.) to whom
+I gueuler to the best of my power. In said repaire I propose to crouch
+and me blottir (in the English shade of the word, for so intensely
+revising an animal, as well) for many, many weeks; so that I fear
+dearest Edith, your idea of "whirling me away" will have to adapt itself
+to the sense worn by "away"--as it clearly so gracefully will! For there
+are senses in which that particle is for me just the most obnoxious
+little object in the language. Make your fond use of it at any rate by
+first coming away--away hither....
+
+/*
+Yours all and always,
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+P.S. This was begun five days ago--and was raggedly and ruthlessly
+broken off--had to be--and I didn't mark the place this Sunday a.m.
+where I took it up again--on page 6th. But I put only today's date--as I
+didn't put the other day's at the time.
+
+
+
+
+_To W. E. Norris._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+January 5th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Norris,
+*/
+
+I don't know whether to call this a belated or a premature thing; as "a
+New Year's offering" (and my hand is tremendously _in_ for those just
+now, though it is also tremendously fatigued) it is a bit behind;
+whereas for an independent overture it follows perhaps indiscreetly fast
+on the heels of my Christmas letter. However, as since this last I have
+had the promptest and most beautiful one from you--a miracle of the
+perfect "fist" as well as of the perfect ease and grace--I make bold to
+feel that I am not quite untimely, that you won't find me so, and I
+offer you still all the compliments of the Season--sated and gorged as
+you must by this time be with them and vague thin sustenance as they at
+best afford. If I hadn't already in the course of the several score of
+letters which had long weighed on me and which I really retired to this
+place on Dec. 30th to work off as much as anything else, run into the
+ground the image of the coming year as the grim, veiled, equivocal and
+sinister figure who holds us all in his dread hand and whom we must
+therefore grovel and abase ourselves at once on the threshold of, as to
+curry favour with him, I would give you the full benefit of it--but I
+leave it there as it is; though if you do wish to crawl beside me, here
+I am flat on my face. I am putting in a few more days here--in order to
+bore if possible _through_ my huge heap of postal obligations, the
+accumulation of three or four years, and not very visibly reduced even
+by the heroic efforts of the last week. I have never in all my life
+written so many letters within the same space of time--and I really
+think that is in the full sense of the term documentary proof of my
+recovery of a _normal_ senile strength. I go to-morrow over into Kent to
+spend Sunday with some friends near Maidstone (they have lately acquired
+and extraordinarily restored Allington Castle, which is down in a deep
+sequestered bottom, plants its huge feet in the Medway, actually
+overflowed, I believe, up to its middle). I come back here again (with
+acute lumbago, I quite expect,) and begin again--that is, write 300 more
+letters; after which I relapse fondly, and I think very wisely, upon
+London. Now that I am not _obliged_ to be in this place (by having so
+committed myself to it for better for worse as I had in the past) I find
+I quite like it--having enjoyed the deep peace and ease of it this last
+week; but I have to go away to prove to myself the non-obligation to
+stay, and that takes some doing--which I shall have set about by the
+15th. London was quite delicious during that brown still Xmastide--the
+four or five days after I wrote to you: the drop of life and of traffic
+was beyond anything of the sort I had ever seen in that frame. The
+gregariousness of movement of the population is an amazing
+phenomenon--they had vanished so in a bunch that the streets were an
+uncanny desert, with the difference from of old that the taxis and
+motors were more absent than the cabs and carriages and busses ever
+were, for at any given moment the horizon is through this power of
+disappearance, void of them--whereas the old things _had_, through their
+slowness, to hang about. One _gets_ a taxi, by the way, much faster than
+one ever got a handsome (lo, I have managed to forget how to _write_ the
+extinct object!)--and yet one gets it from so much further away and from
+such an at first hopeless void....
+
+Very romantic and charming the arrival of your gallant George--from all
+across Europe--for his Xmas eve with you; your account of it touches me
+and I find myself ranking you with the celebrated fair of history and
+fable for whom the swimmings of the Hellespont and the breakings of the
+lance were perpetrated. I congratulate you on such a George in these for
+the most part merely "awfully sorry" days, and him on a chance of which
+he must have been awfully glad. And apropos of such felicities--or
+rather of felicities pure and simple, and not quite such, I do heartily
+hope that you _will_ go on to Spain with your niece in the spring--I'm
+convinced that you'll find it a charming adventure. I've myself utterly
+ceased to travel--I'm a limpet now, for the rest of my life, on the rock
+of Britain, but I intensely enjoy the travels of my friends.
+
+My pen fails and my clock strikes and I am yours all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss M. Betham Edwards._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye,
+Jan. 5th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Miss Betham Edwards,
+*/
+
+I can now at last tell you the sad story of the book for Emily
+Morgan--which I am having put up to go to you with this; as well as
+explain a little my long silence. The very day, or the very second day,
+after last seeing you, a change suddenly took place, under great
+necessity, in my then current plans and arrangements; I departed under
+that stress for London, practically to spend the winter, and have come
+back but for a very small number of days--I return there next week.
+"But," you will say, "why didn't you send the promised volume for E. M.
+from _London_ then? What matter to us where it came from so long as it
+came?" To which I reply: "Well, I had in this house a small row of books
+available for the purpose and among which I could choose--also which I
+came away, in my precipitation, too soon to catch up in flight. In
+London I should have to go and _buy_ the thing, my own production--while
+I _have_ two or three bran-new volumes, which will be an economy to a
+man utterly depleted by the inordinate number of copies of _The Outcry_
+that he has given away and all but six of which he has had to pay
+for--his sanguinary (admire my restraint!) publisher allowing him but
+six." "Why then couldn't you write home and have one of the books in
+question sent you?--or have it sent to Hastings directly from your
+house?" "Because I am the happy possessor of a priceless parlourmaid who
+_loves_ doing up books, and other parcels, and does them up beautifully,
+and if the volume comes to me here, to be inscribed, I shall then have
+to do it up myself, an act for which I have absolutely no skill and
+which I dread and loathe, and tumble it forth clumsily and insecurely!
+Besides I was vague as to which of my works I _did_ have on the
+accessible shelf--I only knew I had some--and would have to look and
+consider and decide: which I have now punctually done. And the thing
+will be beautifully wrapped!" "That's all very well; but why then didn't
+you write and explain why it was that you were keeping us unserved and
+uninformed?" "Oh, because from the moment I go up to town I
+_plunge_--plunge into the great whirlpool of postal matter, social
+matter, and above all, this time, grey matter of _cerebration_--having
+got back to horrible arrears of work and being at best so _postally_
+submerged during these last weeks that every claim of that sort that
+could be temporarily dodged was a claim that found me shameless and
+heartless." But you see the penalty of all is that I have to write all
+_this_ now.
+
+...I'm glad you like adverbs--I adore them; they are the only
+qualifications I really much respect, and I agree with the fine author
+of your quotations in saying--or in thinking--that the sense for them is
+_the_ literary sense. None other is much worth speaking of. But I hope
+my volume won't contain too many for Emily Morgan. Don't let her dream
+of "acknowledging" it. She can do so when we meet again. Perhaps you can
+even help her out with the book by reading, yourself, the Beast in the
+Jungle, say--or the Birthplace. May our generally so ambiguous 1912 be
+all easy figuring for _you_. Yours, dear Miss Betham Edwards, all
+faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Wilfred Sheridan._
+
+/#
+ Mr. and Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan had asked him to be godfather to
+ their eldest child.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+105 Pall Mall, S.W.
+Jan. 12th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Wilfred,
+*/
+
+Beautiful and touching to me your conjoined appeal, with dear Clare's,
+but I beg you to see the matter in the clear and happy light when I say
+that I'm afraid it won't do and that the blest Babe must really be
+placed, on the threshhold of life (there should be but _one_ h
+there--don't teach her to _spell_ by me!) under some more valid and more
+charming protection than that of my accumulated and before long so
+_concluding_ years. She mustn't be taken, for her first happy holiday,
+to visit her late godfather's tomb--as would certainly be the case were
+I to lend myself to the fond anachronism her too rosy-visioned parents
+so flatteringly propose. You see, dear Wilfred, I speak from a wealth of
+wisdom and experience--life has made me rather exceptionally acquainted
+with the godpaternal function (so successful an impostor would I seem to
+have been,) and it was long since brought home to me that the character
+takes more wearing and its duties more performing than I feel I have
+ever been able to give it. I have three godchildren living (for to some
+I have been fatal)--two daughters and a son; and my conscience tells me
+that I have long grossly neglected them. They write me--at considerable
+length sometimes, and I just remember that I have one of their last
+sweet appeals still unanswered. This, dear Clare and dear Wilfred, is
+purely veracious history--a dark chapter in my life. Let me not add
+another--let me show at last a decent compunction. Let me not offer up a
+helpless and unconscious little career on the altar of my incompetence.
+Frankly, the lovely child should find at her font a younger and braver
+and nimbler presence, one that shall go on with her longer and become
+accessible to her personal knowledge. You will feel this together on
+easier reflection--just as you will see how my plea goes hand in hand
+with my deep appreciation of your exquisite confidence.
+
+You must indeed, Wilfred, have been through terrific tension--I gathered
+from Ethel Dilke's letter that Clare's crisis had been dire; such are
+not the hours when a man most feels the privilege and pride of
+fatherhood. But I rejoice greatly in the good conditions now, and
+already make out that the daughter is to be of prodigious power, beauty
+and stature. I feel for that matter that by the time Easter comes I
+should drop her straight into the ritual reservoir--with a scandalous
+splash. It will take more than me--! (though you may well say you don't
+_want_ more--after so many words!) I embrace you all three and am
+devotedly yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Walter V. R. Berry._
+
+/#
+ H. J. never at any time received presents easily, and the
+ difficulty seems to have reached a climax over one recently sent
+ him by Mr. Berry. It may not be obvious that the gift in question
+ was a leather dressing-case.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+February 8th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+Tres-cher et tres-grand ami!
+*/
+
+How you must have wondered at my silence! But it has been, alas,
+inevitable and now is but feebly and dimly broken. Just after you passed
+through London--or rather even _while_ you were passing through it--I
+began to fall upon evil days again; a deplorable bout of unwellness
+which, making me fit for nothing, gave me a sick struggle, first, in
+those awkward Pall Mall conditions, and then reduced me to scrambling
+back here as best I might, where I have been these several days but a
+poor ineffectual rag. I shall get better here if I can still further
+draw on my sadly depleted store of time and patience; but meanwhile I am
+capable but of this weak and appealing grimace--so deeply discouraged am
+I to feel that there are still, and after I have travelled so far, such
+horrid little deep holes for me to tumble into. (This has been a deeper
+one than for many months, though I am, I believe, slowly scrambling out;
+and blest to me has been the resource of crawling to cover here--for
+better aid and comfort.) ... The case has really and largely been,
+however, all the while, dearest Walter, that of my having had to yield,
+just after your glittering passage in town, to that simply overwhelming
+_coup de massue_ of your--well, of your you know what. It was _that_
+that knocked me down--when I was just trembling for a fall; it was that
+that laid me flat.
+
+_February 14th._ Well, dearest Walter, it laid me after all so flat that
+I broke down, a week ago, in the foregoing attempt to do you, and your
+ineffable procede, some manner of faint justice; I wasn't then apt for
+any sort of right or worthy approach to you, and there was nothing for
+me but resignedly to intermit and _me recoucher_. You had done it with
+your own mailed fist--mailed in glittering gold, speciously glazed in
+polished, inconceivably and indescribably sublimated, leather, and I had
+rallied but too superficially from the stroke. It claimed its victim
+afresh, and I have lain the better part of a week just languidly heaving
+and groaning as a result _de vos oeuvres_--and forced thereby quite to
+neglect and ignore all letters. I am a little more on my feet again, and
+if this continues shall presently be able to return to town (Saturday or
+Monday;) where, however, the monstrous object will again confront me.
+That is the grand fact of the situation--that is the tawny lion,
+portentous creature, in my path. I can't get past him, I can't get round
+him, and on the other hand he stands glaring at me, refusing to give way
+and practically blocking all my future. I can't live with him, you see;
+because I can't live _up_ to him. His claims, his pretensions, his
+dimensions, his assumptions and consumptions, above all the manner in
+which he causes every surrounding object (on my poor premises or within
+my poor range) to tell a dingy or deplorable tale--all this makes him
+the very scourge of my life, the very blot on my scutcheon. He doesn't
+regild that rusty metal--he simply takes up an attitude of gorgeous
+swagger, straight in front of all the rust and the rubbish, which makes
+me look as if I had stolen _somebody else's_ (re-garnished _blason_) and
+were trying to palm it off as my own. Cher et bon Gaultier, I simply
+can't _afford_ him, and that is the sorry homely truth. _He is out of
+the picture_--out of _mine_; and behold me condemned to live forever
+with that canvas turned to the wall. Do you know what that means?--to
+have to give up going about at all, lest complications (of the most
+incalculable order) should ensue from its being seen what I go about
+_with_. Bonne renommee vaut mieux que sac-de-voyage dore, and though I
+may have had weaknesses that have brought me a little under public
+notice, my modest hold-all (which has accompanied me in most of my
+voyage through life) has at least, so far as I know, never _fait jaser_.
+All this I have to think of--and I put it candidly to you while yet
+there is time. That you shouldn't have counted the cost--to
+yourself--that is after all perhaps conceivable (quoiqu'a peine!) but
+that you shouldn't have counted the cost to _me_, to whom it spells
+ruin: _that_ ranks you with those great lurid, though lovely, romantic
+and historic figures and charmers who have scattered their affections
+and lavished their favours only (as it has presently appeared) to
+consume and to destroy! More prosaically, dearest Walter (if one of the
+most lyric acts recorded in history--and one of the most finely
+aesthetic, and one stamped with the most matchless grace, _has_ a
+prosaic side,) I have been truly overwhelmed by the princely munificence
+and generosity of your procede, and I have gasped under it while tossing
+on the bed of indisposition. For a beau geste, c'est le plus beau, by
+all odds, of any in all my life ever esquisse in my direction, and it
+_has_, as such, left me really and truly panting helplessly after--or
+rather quite intensely _before_--it! What is a poor man to do, mon
+prince, mon bon prince, mon grand prince, when so prodigiously practised
+upon? There is _nothing_, you see: for the proceeding itself swallows at
+a gulp, with its open crimson jaws (_such_ a rosy mouth!) like Carlyle's
+Mirabeau, "all formulas." One doesn't "thank," I take it, when the
+heavens open--that is when the whale of Mr. Allen's-in-the-Strand
+celestial shopfront does--and discharge straight into one's lap the
+perfect compendium, the very burden of the song, of just what the Angels
+have been raving about ever since we first heard of them. Well _may_
+they have raved--but I can't, you see; I have to take the case (the
+incomparable suit-case) in abject silence and submission. Ah, Walter,
+Walter, why do you do these things? they're magnificent, but they're
+not--well, discussable or permissible or forgiveable. At least not all
+at once. It will take a long, long time. Only little by little and
+buckle-hole by buckle-hole, shall I be able to look, with you, even one
+strap in the face. As yet a sacred horror possesses me, and I must ask
+you to let me, please, though writing you at such length, not so much as
+mention the subject. It's better so. Perhaps your conscience will tell
+you why--tell you, I mean, that great supreme _gestes_ are only fair
+when addressed to those who can themselves gesticulate. I can't--and it
+makes me feel so awkward and graceless and poor. I go about trying--so
+as to hurl it (something or other) back on you; but it doesn't come
+off--practice _doesn't_ make perfect; you are victor, winner, master, oh
+irresistible one--you've done it, you've brought it off and got me down
+forever, and I must just feel your weight and bear your might to bless
+your name--even to the very end of the days of yours, dearest Walter,
+all too abjectly and too touchedly,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To W. D. Howells._
+
+/#
+ The following "open letter" was written to be read at the dinner
+ held in New York in celebration of Mr. Howells's seventy-fifth
+ birthday.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+105 Pall Mall, S.W.
+February 19th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Howells,
+*/
+
+It is made known to me that they are soon to feast in New York the
+newest and freshest of the splendid birthdays to which you keep treating
+us, and that your many friends will meet round you to rejoice in it and
+reaffirm their allegiance. I shall not be there, to my sorrow, and
+though this is inevitable I yet want to be missed, peculiarly and
+monstrously missed; so that these words shall be a public apology for my
+absence: read by you, if you like and can stand it, but better still
+read _to_ you and in fact straight _at_ you, by whoever will be so kind
+and so loud and so distinct. For I doubt, you see, whether any of your
+toasters and acclaimers have anything like my ground and title for being
+with you at such an hour. There can scarce be one, I think, to-day, who
+has known you from so far back, who has kept so close to you for so
+long, and who has such fine old reasons--so old, yet so well
+preserved--to feel your virtue and sound your praise. My debt to you
+began well-nigh half a century ago, in the most personal way possible,
+and then kept growing and growing with your own admirable growth--but
+always rooted in the early intimate benefit. This benefit was that you
+held out your open editorial hand to me at the time I began to
+write--and I allude especially to the summer of 1866--with a frankness
+and sweetness of hospitality that was really the making of me, the
+making of the confidence that required help and sympathy and that I
+should otherwise, I think, have strayed and stumbled about a long time
+without acquiring. You showed me the way and opened me the door; you
+wrote to me, and confessed yourself struck with me--I have never
+forgotten the beautiful thrill of _that_. You published me at once--and
+paid me, above all, with a dazzling promptitude; magnificently, I felt,
+and so that nothing since has ever quite come up to it. More than this
+even, you cheered me on with a sympathy that was in itself an
+inspiration. I mean that you talked to me and listened to me--ever so
+patiently and genially and suggestively conversed and consorted with me.
+This won me to you irresistibly and made you the most interesting person
+I knew--lost as I was in the charming sense that my best friend was an
+editor, and an almost insatiable editor, and that such a delicious being
+as that was a kind of property of my own. Yet how didn't that interest
+still quicken and spread when I became aware that--with such attention
+as you could spare from us, for I recognised my fellow beneficiaries--you
+had started to cultivate _your_ great garden as well; the tract of
+virgin soil that, beginning as a cluster of bright, fresh, sunny and
+savoury patches, close about the house, as it were, was to become that
+vast goodly pleasaunce of art and observation, of appreciation and
+creation, in which you have laboured, without a break or a lapse, to
+this day, and in which you have grown so grand a show of--well, really
+of everything. Your liberal visits to _my_ plot, and your free-handed
+purchases there, were still greater events when I began to see you
+handle, yourself, with such ease the key to our rich and inexhaustible
+mystery. Then the question of what you would make of your own powers
+began to be even more interesting than the question of what you would
+make of mine--all the more, I confess, as you had ended by settling this
+one so happily. My confidence in myself, which you had so helped me to,
+gave way to a fascinated impression of your own spread and growth; for
+you broke out so insistently and variously that it was a charm to watch
+and an excitement to follow you. The only drawback that I remember
+suffering from was that _I_, your original debtor, couldn't print or
+publish or pay you--which would have been a sort of ideal _re_payment
+and of enhanced credit; you could take care of yourself so beautifully,
+and I could (unless by some occasional happy chance or rare favour)
+scarce so much as glance at your proofs or have a glimpse of your
+"endings." I could only read you, full-blown and finished--and see, with
+the rest of the world, how you were doing it again and again.
+
+That then was what I had with time to settle down to--the common
+attitude of seeing you do it again and again; keep on doing it, with
+your heroic consistency and your noble, genial abundance, during all the
+years that have seen so many apparitions come and go, so many vain
+flourishes attempted and achieved, so many little fortunes made and
+unmade, so many weaker inspirations betrayed and spent. Having myself to
+practise meaner economies, I have admired, from period to period, your
+so ample and liberal flow; wondered at your secret for doing positively
+a little--what do I say a little? I mean a magnificent deal!--of
+Everything. I seem to myself to have faltered and languished, to have
+missed more occasions than I have grasped, while you have piled up your
+monument just by remaining at your post. For you have had the advantage,
+after all, of breathing an air that has suited and nourished you; of
+sitting up to your neck, as I may say--or at least up to your
+waist--amid the sources of your inspiration. There and so you were at
+your post; there and so the spell could ever work for you, there and so
+your relation to all your material grow closer and stronger, your
+perception penetrate, your authority accumulate. They make a great
+array, a literature in themselves, your studies of American life, so
+acute, so direct, so disinterested, so preoccupied but with the fine
+truth of the case; and the more attaching to me, always, for their
+referring themselves to a time and an order when we knew together what
+American life _was_--or thought we did, deluded though we may have been!
+I don't pretend to measure the effect, or to sound the depths, if they
+be not the shallows, of the huge wholesale importations and so-called
+assimilations of this later time; I can only feel and speak for those
+conditions in which, as "quiet observers," as careful painters, as
+sincere artists, we could still, in our native, our human and social
+element, know more or less where we were and feel more or less what we
+had hold of. You knew and felt these things better than I; you had
+learnt them earlier and more intimately, and it was impossible, I think,
+to be in more instinctive and more informed possession of the general
+truth of your subject than you happily found yourself. The _real_ affair
+of the American case and character, as it met your view and brushed your
+sensibility, that was what inspired and attached you, and, heedless of
+foolish flurries from other quarters, of all wild or weak slashings of
+the air and wavings in the void, you gave yourself to it with an
+incorruptible faith. You saw your field with a rare lucidity; you saw
+all it had to give in the way of the romance of the real and the
+interest and the thrill and the charm of the common, as one may put it;
+the character and the comedy, the point, the pathos, the tragedy, the
+particular home-grown humanity under your eyes and your hand and with
+which the life all about you was closely interknitted. Your hand reached
+out to these things with a fondness that was in itself a literary gift,
+and played with them as the artist only and always can play: freely,
+quaintly, incalculably, with all the assurance of his fancy and his
+irony, and yet with that fine taste for the truth and the pity and the
+meaning of the matter which keeps the temper of observation both sharp
+and sweet. To observe, by such an instinct and by such reflection, is to
+find work to one's hand and a challenge in every bush; and as the
+familiar American scene thus bristled about you, so, year by year, your
+vision more and more justly responded and swarmed. You put forth A
+Modern Instance, and The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Hazard of New
+Fortunes, and The Landlord at Lion's Head, and The Kentons (that
+perfectly classic illustration of your spirit and your form,) after
+having put forth in perhaps lighter-fingered prelude A Foregone
+Conclusion, and The Undiscovered Country, and The Lady of the Aroostook,
+and The Minister's Charge--to make of a long list too short a one; with
+the effect, again and again, of a feeling for the human relation, as the
+social climate of our country qualifies, intensifies, generally
+conditions and colours it, which, married in perfect felicity to the
+expression you found for its service, constituted the originality that
+we want to fasten upon you, as with silver nails, to-night. Stroke by
+stroke and book by book your work was to become, for this exquisite
+notation of our whole democratic light and shade and give and take, in
+the highest degree _documentary_; so that none other, through all your
+fine long season, could approach it in value and amplitude. None, let me
+say too, was to approach it in essential distinction; for you had grown
+master, by insidious practices best known to yourself, of a method so
+easy and so natural, so marked with the personal element of your humour
+and the play, not less personal, of your sympathy, that the critic kept
+coming on its secret connection with the grace of letters much as
+Fenimore Cooper's Leather-stocking--so knowing to be able to do
+it!--comes, in the forest, on the subtle tracks of Indian braves.
+However, these things take us far, and what I wished mainly to put on
+record is my sense of that unfailing, testifying truth in you which will
+keep you from ever being neglected. The critical intelligence--if any
+such fitful and discredited light may still be conceived as within our
+sphere--has not at all begun to render you its tribute. The more
+inquiringly and perceivingly it shall still be projected upon the
+American life we used to know, the more it shall be moved by the
+analytic and historic spirit, the more indispensable, the more a vessel
+of light, will you be found. It's a great thing to have used one's
+genius and done one's work with such quiet and robust consistency that
+they fall by their own weight into that happy service. You may remember
+perhaps, and I like to recall, how the great and admirable Taine, in one
+of the fine excursions of his French curiosity, greeted you as a
+precious painter and a sovereign witness. But his appreciation, I want
+you to believe with me, will yet be carried much further, and
+then--though you may have argued yourself happy, in your generous way
+and with your incurable optimism, even while noting yourself not
+understood--your really beautiful time will come. Nothing so much as
+feeling that he may himself perhaps help a little to bring it on can
+give pleasure to yours all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+/#
+ The following refers to the third volume (covering the years 1838
+ to 1848) of Mme Vladimir Karenine's "George Sand, sa Vie et ses
+ OEuvres," an article on which, written by H. J. for the
+ _Quarterly Review_, appears in _Notes on Novelists_.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
+March 13th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Edith,
+*/
+
+Just a word to thank you--so inadequately--for everything. Your letter
+of the 1st infinitely appeals to me, and the 3d vol. of the amazing
+Vladimir (amazing for _acharnement_ over her subject) has rejoiced my
+heart the more that I had quite given up expecting it. The two first
+vols. had long ago deeply held me--but I had at last had to suppose them
+but a colossal fragment. Fortunately the whole thing proves less
+fragmentary _than_ colossal, and our dear old George _ressort_ more and
+more prodigious the nearer one gets to her. The passages you marked
+contribute indeed _most_ to this ineffable effect--and the long letter
+to sweet Solange is surely one of the rarest fruits of the human
+intelligence, one of the great things of literature. And what a value it
+all gets from our memory of that wondrous day when we explored the very
+scene where they pigged so thrillingly together. What a crew, what
+_moeurs_, what habits, what conditions and relations every way--and
+what an altogether mighty and marvellous George!--not diminished by all
+the greasiness and smelliness in which she made herself (and _so_ many
+other persons!) at home. Poor gentlemanly, crucified Chop!--not
+naturally at home in grease--but having been originally _pulled_ in--and
+floundering there at last to extinction! _Ce qui depasse_, however--and
+it makes the last word about dear old G. really--is her overwhelming
+_glibness_, as exemplified, e.g., in her long letter to Gryzmala (or
+whatever his name,) the one to the first page or two of which your
+pencil-marks refer me, and in which she "posts" him, as they say at
+Stockbridge, as to all her _amours_. To have such a flow of remark on
+that subject, and everything connected with it, at her command helps
+somehow to make one feel that Providence laid up for the French such a
+store of remark, in advance and, as it were, should the worst befall,
+that their conduct and _moeurs_, coming _after_, had positively to
+justify and do honour to the whole collection of formulae, phrases and,
+as I say, glibnesses--so that as there were at any rate such things
+there for them to inevitably _say_, why not simply _do_ all the things
+that would give them a _rapport_ and a sense? The things _we_, poor
+disinherited race, do, we have to do so dimly and sceptically, without
+the sense of any such beautiful _cadres_ awaiting us--and therefore
+poorly and going but half--or a tenth--of the way. It makes a difference
+when you have to invent your suggestions and glosses all after the fact:
+you do it so miserably compared with Providence--especially Providence
+aided by the French language: which by the way convinces me that
+Providence thinks and _really_ expresses itself only in French, the
+language of gallantry. It will be a joy when we can next converse on
+these and cognate themes--I know of no such link of true interchange as
+a community of interest in dear old George.
+
+I don't know what else to tell you--nor where this will find you.... I
+kind of pray that you may have been able to make yourself a system of
+some sort--to have arrived at some _modus vivendi_. The impossible wears
+on us, but we wear a little here, I think, even on the coal-strike and
+the mass of its attendant misery; though they produce an effect and
+create an atmosphere unspeakably dismal and depressing; to which the
+window-smashing women add a darker shade. I am blackly bored when the
+latter are at large and at work; but somehow I am still _more_ blackly
+bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them....
+
+Yours all and always, dearest Edith,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To H. G. Wells._
+
+/#
+ This refers to a proposal (which did not take effect) that Mr.
+ Wells should become a member of the lately formed Academic
+ Committee of the Royal Society of Literature.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+105 Pall Mall, S.W.
+March 25th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Wells,
+*/
+
+Your letter is none the less interesting for being what, alas, I
+believed it might be; in spite of which interest--or in spite of which
+belief at least--here I am at it again! I know perfectly what you mean
+by your indifference to Academies and Associations, Bodies and Boards,
+on all this ground of ours; no one should know better, as it is
+precisely my own state of mind--really caring as I do for nothing in the
+world but lonely patient virtue, which doesn't seek that company.
+Nevertheless I fondly hoped that it might end for you as it did, under
+earnest invitation, for me--in your having said and felt all those
+things _and then joined_--for the general amenity and civility and
+unimportance of the thing, giving it the benefit of the doubt--for the
+sake of the good-nature. You will say that you _had_ no doubt and
+couldn't therefore act on any: but that germ, alas, was what my letter
+sought to implant--in addition to its not being a question of your
+acting, but simply of your _not_ (that is of your not refusing, but
+simply lifting your oar and letting yourself float on the current of
+acclamation.) There would be no question of your being entangled or
+hampered, or even, I think, of your being bored; the common ground
+between all lovers and practitioners of our general form would be under
+your feet so _naturally_ and not at all out of your way; and it wouldn't
+be you in the least who would have to take a step backward or aside, it
+would be _we_ gravitating toward you, melting into your orbit as a mere
+more direct effect of the energy of your genius. Your plea of your being
+anarchic and seeing your work as such isn't in the least, believe me, a
+reason against; for (also believe me) you are essentially wrong about
+that! No talent, no imagination, no application of art, as great as
+yours, is able not to make much less for anarchy than for a continuity
+and coherency much bigger than any disintegration. There's no
+representation, no picture (which is your form,) that isn't by its very
+nature preservation, association, and of a positive associational
+_appeal_--that is the very grammar of it; none that isn't thereby some
+sort of interesting or curious _order_: I utterly defy it in short not
+to make, all the anarchy in the world aiding, far more than it
+unmakes--just as I utterly defy the anarchic to express itself
+representationally, art aiding, talent aiding, the play of invention
+aiding, in short _you_ aiding, without the grossest, the absurdest
+inconsistency. So it is that you are _in_ our circle anyhow you can fix
+it, and with us always drawing more around (though always at a
+respectful and considerate distance,) fascinatedly to admire and
+watch--all to the greater glory of the English name, and the brave, as
+brave as possible English array; the latter brave even with the one
+American blotch upon it. Oh _patriotism_!--that mine, the mere paying
+guest in the house, should have its credit more at heart than its
+unnatural, its proud and perverse son! However, all this isn't to worry
+or to weary (I wish it _could_!) your ruthlessness; it's only to drop a
+sigh on my shattered dream that you might have come among us with as
+much freedom as grace. I prolong the sigh as I think how much you might
+have done for _our_ freedom--and how little we could do against yours!
+
+Don't answer or acknowledge this unless it may have miraculously moved
+you by some quarter of an inch. But then oh _do_!--though I must warn
+you that I shall in that case follow it up to the death!
+
+/*
+Yours all faithfully,
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Lady Bell._
+
+
+/*
+Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
+May 17th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Florence Bell,
+*/
+
+A good friend of ours--in fact one of our very best--spoke to me here a
+few days ago of your having lately had (all unknown to me) a great
+tribulation of illness; but also told me, to my lively relief, that you
+are getting steadily well again and that (thankful at the worst for
+small mercies after such an ordeal) you are in some degree accessible to
+the beguilement and consolation of letters. I have only taken time to
+wonder whether just such a mercy as _this_ may not be even below the
+worst--but am letting the question rest on the basis of my feeling that
+you must _never_, and that you _will_ never, dream of any
+"acknowledging" of so inevitable a little sign of sympathy. Such dreams,
+I too well know, only aggravate and hamper the upward struggle, don't in
+the least lighten or quicken it. Take absolute example by me--who had a
+very dismal bad illness two and a half years ago (from out of the
+blackness of which I haven't even now wholly emerged,) and who reflect
+with positive complacency on all my letters, the received ones, of that
+time, that still, and that largely always will, remain unanswered. I
+want you to be complacent too--though at this rate there won't be much
+for you to be so _about_! I really hope you go on smoothly and
+serenely--and am glad now that I didn't helplessly know you were so
+stricken. But I wish I had for you a few solid chunks of digestible
+(that is, mainly good) news--such as, given your constitutional charity,
+will melt in your mouth. (There are people for whom only the other sort
+is digestible.) But I somehow in these subdued days--I speak of my own
+very personal ones--don't _make_ news; I even rather dread breaking out
+into it, or having it break into me: it's so much oftener--
+
+
+
+
+_May 26th._ Hill Hall, Theydon Mount, Epping.
+
+
+I began the above now many days ago, and it was dashed from my hand by a
+sudden flap of one of the thousand tentacles of the London day--broken
+off short by that aggressive gesture (if the flapping of a tentacle _is_
+a conceivable gesture;) and here I take it up again in another place and
+at the first moment of any sort of freedom and ease for it. As I read it
+over the interruption strikes me as a sort of blessing in disguise, as I
+can't imagine what I meant to say in that last portentous sentence, now
+doubtless never to be finished, and not in the least deserving it--even
+if it can have been anything less than the platitude that the news one
+gets is much more usually bad than good, and that as the news one gives
+is scarce more, mostly, than the news one has got, so the indigent
+state, in that line, is more gracefully worn than the bloated. I must
+have meant something better than that. At any rate see how indigent I
+am--that with all the momentous things that ought to have happened to
+me to explain my sorry lapse (for so many days,) my chronicle would seem
+only of the smallest beer. Put it at least that with these humble items
+the texture of my life has bristled--even to the effect of a certain
+fever and flurry; but they are such matters as would make no figure
+among the great issues and processions of Rounton--as I believe that
+great order to proceed. The nearest approach to the showy is my having
+come down here yesterday for a couple of days--in order not to prevent
+my young American nephew and niece (just lately married, and to whom I
+have been lending my little house in the country) from the amusement of
+it; as, being invited, they yet wouldn't come without my dim
+protection--so that I have made, dimly protective, thus much of a dash
+into the world--where I find myself quite vividly resigned. It is the
+world of the wonderful and delightful Mrs. Charles Hunter, whom you may
+know (long my very kind friend;) and all swimming just now in a sea of
+music: John Sargent (as much a player as a painter,) Percy Grainger,
+Roger Quilter, Wilfred von Glehn, and others; round whose harmonious
+circle, however, I roam as in outer darkness, catching a vague glow
+through the veiled windows of the temple, but on the whole only
+intelligent enough to feel and rue my stupidity--which is quite the
+wrong condition. It is a great curse not to be densely enough
+indifferent to enough impossible things! Most things are impossible to
+me; but I blush for it--can't brazen it out that they are no loss.
+Brazening it out is the secret of life--for the _peu doues_. But what
+need of that have _you_, lady of the full programme and the rich
+performance? What I do enter here (beyond the loving-kindness _de toute
+cette jeunesse_) is the fresh illustration of the beauty and amenity and
+ancientry of this wondrous old England, which at twenty miles or so
+from London surrounds this admirable and interesting and historic house
+with a green country as wide and free, and apparently as sequestered,
+and strikingly as rural--in the Constable way--as if it were on the
+other side of the island. But I leave it to-morrow to go back to town
+till (probably) about July 1st, before which I fondly hope you may be so
+firm on your feet as to be able to glide again over those beautiful
+parquets of 95. In that case I shall be so delighted to glide in upon
+you--assuming my balance preserved--at some hour gently appointed by
+yourself. Then I shall tell you more--if you can stand more after
+this--fourteen sprawling and vacuous pages. (Alas, I am but _too_ aware
+there is nothing in them; nothing, that is, but the affectionate
+fidelity, with every blessing on your further complete healing, of)
+yours all constantly,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
+
+/#
+ On May 7, 1912, the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of
+ Literature celebrated the centenary of the birth of Robert
+ Browning. H. J. read a paper on "The Novel in _The Ring and the
+ Book_," afterwards included in _Notes on Novelists_. In an
+ appreciative notice of the occasion in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ Mr.
+ Filson Young described his voice as "old."
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
+May 18th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Lucy!
+*/
+
+Your impulse to steep me, and hold me down under water, in the Fountain
+of Youth, with Charles Boyd muscularly to help you, is no less beautiful
+than the expression you have given it, by which I am more touched than I
+can tell you. I take it as one of your constant kindnesses--but I had,
+all the same, I fear, taken Filson Young's Invidious Epithet (in that
+little compliment) as inevitable, wholly, though I believe it was mainly
+applied to my _voice_. My voice _was_ on that Centenary itself
+Centenarian--for reasons that couldn't be helped--for I really that day
+wasn't fit to speak. As for one's own sense of antiquity, my own, what
+is one to say?--it varies, goes and comes; at times isn't there at all
+and at others is quite sufficient, thank you! I cultivate not thinking
+about it--and yet in certain ways I like it, like the sense of having
+had a great deal of life. The young, on the whole, make me pretty
+sad--the old themselves don't. But the _pretension_ to youth is a thing
+that makes me saddest and oldest of all; the _acceptance_ of the fact
+that I am all the while growing older on the other hand decidedly
+rejuvenates me; I say "what then?" and the answer doesn't come, there
+doesn't seem to be any, and that quite sets me up. So I am young
+_enough_--and you are magnificent, simply: I get from you the sense of
+an inexhaustible vital freshness, and your voice is the voice (so
+beautiful!) of your twentieth year. Your going to America was admirably
+young--an act of your twenty-fifth. Don't _be_ younger than that; don't
+seem a year younger than you do seem; for in that case you will have
+quite withdrawn from my side. Keep up with me a _little_. I shall come
+to see you again at no distant day, but the coming week seems to have
+got itself pretty well encumbered, and on the 24th or 26th I go to Rye
+for four or five days. After that I expect to be in town quite to the
+end of June. I am reading the Green Book in bits--as it were--the only
+way in which I _can_ read (or at least do read the contemporary
+novel--though I read so very few--almost none.) My only way of
+reading--apart from that--is to imagine myself _writing_ the thing
+before me, treating the subject--and thereby often differing from the
+author and his--or _her_--way. I find G. W. very brisk and alive, but I
+_have_ to take it in pieces, or liberal sips, and so have only reached
+the middle. What I feel critically (and I can feel about anything of the
+sort but critically) is that you don't _squeeze_ your material hard and
+tight enough, to press out of its ounces and inches what they will give.
+That material lies too loose in your hand--or your hand, otherwise
+expressed, doesn't tighten round it. That is the fault of all fictive
+writing now, it seems to me--that and the inordinate abuse of
+dialogue--though this but one effect of the not squeezing. It's a wrong,
+a disastrous and unscientific economy altogether. _I_ squeeze as I read
+you--but that, as I say, is rewriting! However, I will tell you more
+when I have eaten all the pieces. And I shall love and stick to you
+always--as your old, very old, _oldest_ old
+
+/*
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Hugh Walpole._
+
+
+/*
+Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
+May 19th, 1912.
+*/
+
+...Your letter greatly moves and regales me. Fully do I enter into your
+joy of sequestration, and your bliss of removal from this scene of
+heated turmoil and dusty despair--which, however, re-awaits you! Never
+mind; sink up to your neck into the brimming basin of nature and peace,
+and teach yourself--by which I mean let your grandmother teach you--that
+with each revolving year you will need and make more piously these
+precious sacrifices to Pan and the Muses. History eternally repeats
+itself, and I remember well how in the old London years (of _my_ old
+London--_this_ isn't that one) I used to clutch at these chances of
+obscure flight and at the possession, less frustrated, of my soul, my
+senses and my hours. So keep it up; I miss you, little as I see you even
+when here (for I _feel_ you more than I see you;) but I surrender you at
+whatever cost to the beneficent powers. Therefore I rejoice in the
+getting on of your work--how splendidly copious your flow; and am much
+interested in what you tell me of your readings and your literary
+emotions. These latter indeed--or some of them, as you express them, I
+don't think I fully share. At least when you ask me if I don't feel
+Dostoieffsky's "mad jumble, that flings things down in a heap," nearer
+truth and beauty than the picking and composing that you instance in
+Stevenson, I reply with emphasis that I feel nothing of the sort, and
+that the older I grow and the more I _go_ the more sacred to me do
+picking and composing become--though I naturally don't limit myself to
+Stevenson's _kind_ of the same. Don't let any one persuade you--there
+are plenty of ignorant and fatuous duffers to try to do it--that
+strenuous selection and comparison are not the very essence of art, and
+that Form _is_ [not] substance to that degree that there is absolutely
+no substance without it. Form alone _takes_, and holds and preserves,
+substance--saves it from the welter of helpless verbiage that we swim in
+as in a sea of tasteless tepid pudding, and that makes one ashamed of an
+art capable of such degradations. Tolstoi and D. are fluid puddings,
+though not tasteless, because the amount of their own minds and souls in
+solution in the broth gives it savour and flavour, thanks to the strong,
+rank quality of their genius and their experience. But there are all
+sorts of things to be said of them, and in particular that we see how
+great a vice is their lack of composition, their defiance of economy and
+architecture, directly they are emulated and imitated; _then_, as
+subjects of emulation, models, they quite give themselves away. There is
+nothing so deplorable as a work of art with a _leak_ in its interest;
+and there is no such leak of interest as through commonness of form. Its
+opposite, the _found_ (because the sought-for) form is the absolute
+citadel and tabernacle of interest. But what a lecture I am reading
+you--though a very imperfect one--which you have drawn upon yourself (as
+moreover it was quite right you should.) But no matter--I shall go for
+you again--as soon as I find you in a lone corner....
+
+Well, dearest Hugh, love me a little better (if you _can_) for this
+letter, for I am ever so fondly and faithfully yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Rhoda Broughton._
+
+
+/*
+Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.
+June 2nd, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Rhoda,
+*/
+
+Too many days have elapsed since I got your kind letter--but London days
+do leak away even for one who punily tries to embank and economise
+them--as I do; they fall, as it were, from--or, better still, they
+utterly dissolve _in_--my nerveless grasp. In that enfeebled clutch the
+pen itself tends to waggle and drop; and hence, in short, my appearance
+of languor over the inkstand. This is a dark moist Sunday a.m., and I
+sit alone in the great dim solemn library of this Club (Thackeray's
+Megatherium or whatever,) and say to myself that the conditions now at
+last _ought_ to be auspicious--though indeed that merely tends to make
+me but brood inefficiently over the transformations of London as such
+scenes express them and as I have seen them go on growing. Now at last
+the place becomes an utter void, a desert peopled with ghosts, for all
+except three days (about) of the week--speaking from the social point of
+view. The old Victorian _social_ Sunday is dust and ashes, and a holy
+stillness, a repudiating blankness, has possession--which however, after
+all, has its merits and its conveniences too.... Cadogan Gardens,
+meanwhile, know me no more--the region has turned to sadness, as if,
+with your absence, all the blinds were down, and I now have no such
+confident and cordial afternoon refuge left. Very promptly, next winter,
+the blinds must be up again, and I will keep the tryst. I have been
+talking of you this evening with dear W. E. Norris, who is paying one of
+his much interspaced visits to town and has dined with me, amiably,
+without other attractions. (This letter, begun this a.m. and
+interrupted, I take up again toward midnight.) ...
+
+Good-night, however, now--I must stagger (really from the force of too
+total an abstinence) to my never-unappreciated couch. (Norris dined on a
+bottle of soda-water and I on no drop of anything.) I pray you be
+bearing grandly up, and I live in the light of your noble fortitude. One
+is always the better for a great example, and I am always all-faithfully
+yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Henry James, junior._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+July 16th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Harry,
+*/
+
+...I came down here from town but five days ago, and feel intensely,
+after so long an absence, the blest, the invaluable, little old
+refuge-quality of dear L. H. at this and kindred seasons. A tremendous
+wave of heat is sweeping over the land--passed on apparently from "your
+side"--and I left London a fiery furnace and the Reform Club a feather
+bed on top of one in the same. The visitation still goes on day after
+day, but, with immense mitigation, I can bear it here--where nothing
+could be more mitigating than my fortunate conditions.
+
+...The "working expensively" meanwhile signifies for me simply the
+"literary and artistic," the technical, side of the matter--the fact
+that in doing this book I am led, by the very process and action of my
+idiosyncrasy, on and on into more evocation and ramification of old
+images and connections, more intellectual and moral autobiography
+(though all closely and, as I feel it, exquisitely associated and
+involved,) than I shall quite know what to do with--to do with, that is,
+in this book (I shall doubtless be able to use rejected or suppressed
+parts in some other way.) It's my more and more (or long since
+established) difficulty always, that I have to project and _do_ a great
+deal in order to choose from that, after the fact, what is most
+designated and supremely urgent. That is a costly way of working, as
+regards time, material etc.--at least in the short run. In the long run,
+and "by and large," it, I think, abundantly justifies itself. That is
+really all I meant to convey to you and to your mother through Bill--as
+a kind of precaution and forewarning--for your inevitable sense of my
+"slowness." Of course too I have had pulls up and breaks, sometimes
+disheartening ones, through the recurrence of bad physical
+conditions--and am still liable, strictly speaking, to these. But the
+main thing to say about these, once for all, is that they tend steadily,
+and most helpfully, to diminish, both in intensity and in duration, and
+that I have really now reached the point at which the successful effort
+to work really helps me physically--to say nothing of course of (a
+thousand times) morally. It remains true that I do worry about the
+money-question--by nature and fate (since I was born worrying, though
+myself much more than others!)--and that this is largely the result of
+these last years of lapse of productive work while my expenses have gone
+more or less (while I was with you all in America less!) ruthlessly on.
+But of this it's also to be cheeringly said that I have only to be
+successfully and continuously at work for a period of about ten days for
+it all to fall into the background altogether (all the worry,) and be
+replaced by the bravest confidence of calculation. So much for _that_!
+And now, for the moment--for this post at least, I must pull up. Well of
+course do I understand that with your big new preoccupations and duties
+close at hand you mayn't dream of a move in this direction, and I should
+be horrified at seeming to exert the least pressure toward your even
+repining at it. More still than the delight of seeing you will be that
+of knowing that you are getting into close quarters with your new job. I
+repeat that you have no idea of the good this will do me!--as to which I
+sit between your Mother and Peg, clasping a hand of each, while we watch
+your every movement and gloat, ecstatically, over you. Oh, give my love
+so aboundingly to them, and to your grandmother, on it all!
+
+Yours, dearest Harry, more affectionately than ever,
+
+/*
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To R. W. Chapman._
+
+/#
+ Mrs. Brookenham is of course the mother of the young heroine of
+ _The Awkward Age_.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+July 17th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Mr. Chapman,
+*/
+
+I very earnestly beg you not to take as the measure of the pleasure
+given me by your letter the inordinate delay of this acknowledgment.
+That admirable communication, reaching me at the climax of the London
+June, found me in a great tangle of difficulties over the command of my
+time and general conduct of my correspondence and other obligations; so
+that after a vain invocation of a better promptness where you were
+concerned, I took heart from the fact that I was soon to be at peace
+down here, and that hence I should be able to address you at my ease. I
+have in fact been here but a few days, and my slight further delay has
+but risen from the fact that I brought down with me so _many_ letters to
+answer!--though none of them, let me say, begins to affect me with the
+beauty and interest of yours.
+
+I am in truth greatly touched, deeply moved by it. What is one to say or
+do in presence of an expression so generous and so penetrating? I can
+only listen very hard, as it were, taking it all in with bowed head and
+clasped hands, not to say moist eyes even, and feel that--well, that the
+whole thing _has_ been after all worth while then. But one is simply in
+the _hands_ of such a reader and appreciator as you--one yields even
+assentingly, gratefully and irresponsibly to the current of your story
+and consistency of your case. I feel that I really don't know much--as
+to what your various particulars imply--save that you are delightful,
+are dazzling, and that you must be beautifully right as to any view that
+you take of anything. Let me say, for all, that if you think so, so it
+must be; for clearly you see and understand and discriminate--while one
+is at the end of time one's self so very vague about many things and
+only conscious of one's general virtuous intentions and considerably
+strenuous effort. What one has done has been conditioned and related and
+involved--so to say, fatalised--every element and effort jammed up
+against some other necessity or yawning over some consequent void--and
+with anything good in one's achievement or fine in one's faculty
+conscious all the while of having to _pay_ by this and that and the
+other corresponding dereliction or weakness. You let me off, however, as
+handsomely as you draw me on, and I see you as absolutely right about
+everything and want only to square with yours _my_ impression: that is
+to say any but that of my being "dim" in respect to some of the aspects,
+possibly, of Mrs. Brookenham--which I don't think I am: I really think I
+could stand a stiff cross-examination on that lady. But this is a
+detail, and I can meet you only in a large and fond pre-submission on
+the various points you make. I greatly wish our contact at Oxford the
+other day had been less hampered and reduced--so that it was impossible,
+in the event, altogether, to get within hail of you at Oriel. But I have
+promised the kind President of Magdalen another visit, and then I shall
+insist on being free to come and see you if you will let me. I cherish
+your letter and our brief talk meanwhile as charmingly-coloured lights
+in the total of that shining occasion. What power to irradiate has
+Oxford at its best!--and as it was, the other week, so greatly at that
+best. I _think_ the gruesome little errors of text you once so devotedly
+noted for me in some of my original volumes don't for the most part
+survive in the collective edition--but though a strenuous I am a
+constitutionally fallible proof-reader, and I am almost afraid to assure
+myself. However, I must more or less face it, and I am yours, dear Mr.
+Chapman, all gratefully and faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Hugh Walpole._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+Aug. 14th, 1912.
+*/
+
+...I rejoice that you wander to such good purpose--by which I mean
+nothing more exemplary that that you apparently live in the light of
+curiosity and cheer. I'm very glad for you that these gentle passions
+have the succulent scene of Munich to pasture in. I haven't been there
+for long years--was never there but once at all, but haven't forgotten
+how genial and sympathetic I found it. Drink deep of every impression
+and have a lot to tell me when the prodigal returns. I love travellers'
+tales--especially when I love the traveller; therefore have plenty to
+thrill me and to confirm that passion withal. I travel no further than
+this, and never shall again; but it serves my lean purposes, or most of
+them, and I'm thankful to be able to do so much and to feel even these
+quiet and wholesome little facts about me. We're having in this rude
+climate a summer of particularly bad and brutal manners--so far the
+sweetness of the matter fails; but I get out in the lulls of the tempest
+(it does nothing but rain and rage,) and when I'm within, my mind still
+to me a kingdom is, however dismembered and shrunken. I haven't seen a
+creature to talk of _you_ with--but I see on these terms very few
+creatures indeed; none worth speaking of, still less worth talking to.
+Clearly _you_ move still in the human maze--but I like to think of you
+there; may it be long before you find the clue to the exit. You say
+nothing of any return to _these_ platitudes, so I suppose you are to be
+still a good while on the war-path; but when you are ready to smoke the
+pipe of peace come and ask _me_ for a light. It's good for you to have
+read Taine's English Lit.; he lacks saturation, lacks _waste_ of
+acquaintance, but sees with a magnificent objectivity, reacts with an
+energy to match, expresses with a splendid amplitude, and has just the
+critical value, I think, of being so off, so _far_ (given such an
+intellectual reach,) and judging and feeling in so different an air.
+It's charming to me to hear that _The Ambassadors_ have again engaged
+and still beguile you; it is probably a very _packed_ production, with a
+good deal of one thing within another; I remember sitting on it, when I
+wrote it, with that intending weight and presence with which you
+probably often sit in these days on your trunk to make the lid close and
+_all_ your trousers and boots go in. I remember putting in a good deal
+about Chad and Strether, or Strether and Chad, rather; and am not sure
+that I quite understand what in that connection you miss--I mean in the
+way of what _could_ be there. The whole thing is of course, to
+intensity, a picture of relations--and among them is, though not on the
+first line, the relation of Strether to Chad. The relation of Chad to
+Strether is a limited and according to my method only implied and
+indicated thing, sufficiently there; but Strether's to Chad consists
+above all in a charmed and yearning and wondering sense, a dimly envious
+sense, of all Chad's young living and easily-taken _other_ relations;
+other not only than the one to him, but than the one to Mme de Vionnet
+and whoever else; this very sense, and the sense of Chad, generally, is
+a part, a large part, of poor dear Strether's discipline, development,
+adventure and general history. All of it that is of my subject seems to
+me given--given by dramatic projection, as all the rest is given: how
+can you say I do anything so foul and abject as to "state"? You deserve
+that I should condemn you to read the book over once again! However,
+instead of this I only impose that you come down to me, on your return,
+for a couple of days--when we can talk better. I hold you to the heart
+of your truest old
+
+/*
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edmund Gosse._
+
+/#
+ With regard to the "dread effulgence of their Lordships" it will be
+ remembered that Mr. Gosse was at this time Librarian of the House
+ of Lords. The allusion at the end is to Mr. Gosse's article on
+ Swinburne in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, further dealt
+ with in the next letter.
+#/
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+7th October, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Gosse,
+*/
+
+Forgive this cold-blooded machinery--for I have been of late a stricken
+man, and still am not on my legs; though judging it a bit urgent to
+briefly communicate with you on a small practical matter. I have had
+quite a Devil of a summer, a very bad and damnable July and August,
+through a renewal of an ailment that I had regarded as a good deal
+subdued, but that descended upon me in force just after I last saw you
+and then absolutely raged for many weeks. (I allude to a most deplorable
+tendency to chronic pectoral, or, more specifically, anginal, pain;
+which, however, I finally, about a month ago, got more or less the
+better of, in a considerably reassuring way.) I was but beginning to
+profit by this comparative reprieve when I was smitten with a violent
+attack of the atrocious affection known as "Shingles"--my impression of
+the nature of which had been vague and inconsiderate, but to the now
+grim shade of which I take off my hat in the very abjection of respect.
+It has been a very horrible visitation, but I am getting better; only I
+am still in bed and have to appeal to you in this graceless mechanical
+way. My appeal bears on a tiny and trivial circumstance, the fact that I
+have practically concluded an agreement for a Flat which I saw and liked
+and seemed to find within my powers before leaving town (No. 21 Carlyle
+Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.) and which I am looking to for a more
+convenient and secure basis of regularly wintering in London, for the
+possibly brief remainder of my days, than any I have for a long time
+had. I want, in response to a letter just received from the proprietors
+of the same, to floor that apparently rather benighted and stupid body,
+who are restless over the question of a "social reference" (in addition
+to my reference to my Bankers), by a regular knock-down production of
+the most eminent and exalted tie I can produce; whereby I have given
+them your distinguished name as that of a voucher for my
+respectability--as distinguished from my solvency; for which latter I
+don't hint that you shall, however dimly, engage! So I have it on my
+conscience, you see, to let you know of the liberty I have thus taken
+with you; this on the chance of their really applying to you (which some
+final saving sense of their being rather silly may indeed keep them from
+doing.) If they do, kindly, very kindly, abound in my sense to the
+extent of intimating to them that not to know me famed for my
+respectability is scarcely to be respectable themselves! That is all I
+am able to trouble you with now. I am as yet a poor thing, more even the
+doctor's than mine own; but shall come round presently and shall then be
+able to give you a better account of myself. There is no question of my
+getting into the Flat in question till some time in January; I don't get
+possession till Dec. 25th, but this preliminary has had to be settled.
+Don't be burdened to write; I know your cares are on the eve of
+beginning again, and how heavy they may presently be. I have only
+wanted to create for our ironic intelligence the harmless pleasure of
+letting loose a little, in a roundabout way, upon the platitude of the
+City and West End Properties Limited, the dread effulgence of their
+Lordships; the latter being the light and you the transparent lantern
+that my shaky hand holds up. More, as I say, when that hand is less
+shaky. I hope all your intimate news is good, and am only waiting for
+the new vol. of the Dictionary with your Swinburne, which a word from
+Sidney Lee has assured me is of maximum value. All faithful greeting.
+
+/*
+Yours always,
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edmund Gosse._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+October 10th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Gosse,
+*/
+
+Your good letter of this morning helps to console and sustain. One
+really needs any lift one can get after this odious experience. I am
+emerging, but it is slow, and I feel much ravaged and bedimmed.
+Fortunately these days have an intrinsic beauty--of the rarest and
+charmingest here; and I try to fling myself on the breast of Nature
+(though I don't mean by that fling myself and my poor blisters and scars
+on the dew-sprinkled lawn) and forget, imperfectly, that precious hours
+and days tumble unrestrained into the large round, the deep dark, the
+ever open, hole of sacrifice. I am almost afraid my silly lessors of the
+Chelsea Flat _won't_ apply to you for a character of me if they haven't
+done so by now; afraid because the idea of a backhander from you,
+reaching them straight, would so gratify my sense of harmless sport. It
+was only a question of a word in case they _should_ appeal; kindly don't
+dream of any such if they let the question rest (in spite indeed of
+their having intimated that they would thoroughly thresh it out.)
+
+I received with pleasure the small Swinburne--of so chaste and charming
+a form; the perusal of which lubricated yesterday two or three rough
+hours. Your composition bristles with items and authenticities even as a
+tight little cushion with individual pins; and, I take it, is everything
+that such a contribution to such a cause should be but for the not quite
+ample enough (for my appetite) conclusive estimate or appraisement. I
+know how little, far too little, to my sense, that element has figured
+in those pages in general; but I should have liked to see you, in spite
+of this, formulate and resume a little more the creature's character and
+genius, the aspect and effect of his general performance. You will say I
+have a morbid hankering for what a Dictionary doesn't undertake, what a
+Sidney Lee perhaps even doesn't offer space for. I admit that I talk at
+my ease--so far as ease is in my line just now. Very charming and happy
+Lord Redesdale's contribution--showing, afresh, how _everything_ about
+such a being as S. becomes and remains interesting. Prettily does
+Redesdale write--and prettily will ---- have winced; if indeed the
+pretty even in that form, or the wincing in any, could be conceived of
+him.
+
+I have received within a day or two dear old George Meredith's Letters;
+and, though I haven't been able yet very much to go into them, I catch
+their emanation of something so admirable and, on the whole, so baffled
+and tragic. We must have more talk of them--and also of Wells' book,
+with which however I am having extreme difficulty. I am not so much
+struck with its hardness as with its weakness and looseness, the utter
+going by the board of any real self-respect of composition and of
+expression.... What lacerates me perhaps most of all in the Meredith
+volumes is the meanness and poorness of editing--the absence of any
+attempt to project the Image (of character, temper, quantity and quality
+of mind, general size and sort of personality) that such a subject cries
+aloud for; to the shame of our purblind criticism. For such a Vividness
+to go a-begging!-- ... When one thinks of what Vividness would in
+France, in such a case, have leaped to its feet in commemorative and
+critical response! But there is too much to say, and I am able, in this
+minor key, to say too little. We must be at it again. I was afraid your
+wife was having another stretch of the dark valley to tread--I had heard
+of your brother-in-law's illness. May peace somehow come! I re-greet and
+regret you all, and am all faithfully yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edmund Gosse._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+October 11th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Gosse,
+*/
+
+Let me thank you again, on this lame basis though I still be, for the
+charming form of your news of your having helped me with my fastidious
+friends of the Flat. Clearly, they were to be hurled to their doom; for
+the proof of your having, with your potent finger, pressed the merciless
+spring, arrives this morning in the form of a quite obsequious request
+that I will conclude our transaction by a signature. This I am doing,
+and I am meanwhile lost in fond consideration of the so susceptible spot
+(susceptible to profanation) that I shall have reached only after such
+purgations. I thank you most kindly for settling the matter.
+
+Very interesting your note--in the matter of George Meredith. Yes, I
+spent much of yesterday reading the Letters, and quite agree with your
+judgment of them on the score of their rather marked non-illustration of
+his intellectual wealth. They make one, it seems to me, enormously
+_like_ him--but that one had always done; and the series to Morley, and
+in a minor degree to Maxse, contain a certain number of rare and fine
+things, many beautiful felicities of wit and vision. But the whole
+aesthetic range, understanding that in a big sense, strikes me as meagre
+and short; he clearly lived even less than one had the sense of his
+doing in the world of art--in that whole divine preoccupation, that
+whole intimate restlessness of projection and perception. And this is
+the more striking that he appears to have been far more communicative
+and overflowing on the whole ground of what he was doing in prose or
+verse than I had at all supposed; to have lived and wrought with all
+those doors more open and publicly slamming and creaking on their
+hinges, as it were, than had consorted with one's sense, and with the
+whole legend, of his intellectual solitude. His whole case is full of
+anomalies, however, and these volumes illustrate it even by the light
+they throw on a certain poorness of range in most of his correspondents.
+Save for Morley (et encore!) most of them figure here as folk too little
+a la hauteur--! though, of course, a man, even of his distinction, can
+live and deal but with those who are within his radius. He was
+_starved_, to my vision, in many ways--and that makes him but the more
+nobly pathetic. In fine the whole moral side of him throws out some
+splendidly clear lights--while the "artist," the secondary Shakespeare,
+remains curiously dim. Your missing any letters to me rests on a
+misconception of my very limited, even though extremely delightful to
+me, active intercourse with him. I had with him no sense of reciprocity;
+he remained for me always a charming, a quite splendid and rather
+strange, Exhibition, so content itself to _be_ one, all genially and
+glitteringly, but all exclusively, that I simply sat before him till the
+curtain fell, and then came again when I felt I should find it up. But I
+never _rang_ it up, never felt any charge on me to challenge him by
+invitation or letter. But one or two notes from him did I find when Will
+Meredith wrote to me; and these, though perfectly charming and kind, I
+have preferred to keep unventilated. However, I am little enough
+observing that same discretion to _you_--! I slowly mend, but it's
+absurd how far I feel I've to come back from. Sore and strained has the
+horrid business left me. But nevertheless I hope, and in fact almost
+propose.
+
+/*
+Yours all faithfully,
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edmund Gosse._
+
+/#
+ _The Morning Post_ article was a review by Mr. Gosse of the
+ _Letters of George Meredith_.
+#/
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+October 13th, 1912. */
+
+/*
+My dear Gosse,
+*/
+
+This is quite a feverish flurry of correspondence--but please don't for
+a moment feel the present to entail on you the least further charge: I
+only want to protest against your imputation of sarcasm to my figure of
+the pin-cushion and the pins--and this all genially: that image having
+represented to myself the highest possible tribute to your biographic
+_facture_. What I particularly meant was that probably no such tense
+satin slope had ever before grown, within the same number of square
+inches, so dense a little forest of discriminated upright stems! There
+you are, and I hear with immense satisfaction of the prospect of another
+crop yet--this time, I infer, on larger ground and with beautiful alleys
+and avenues and vistas piercing the plantation.
+
+I rejoice alike to know of the M.P. article, on which I shall be able to
+put my hand here betimes tomorrow. I can't help wishing I had known of
+it a little before--I should have liked so to bring, in time, a few of
+my gleanings to your mill. But evidently we are quite under the same
+general impression, and your point about the dear man's confoundingness
+of allusion to the products of the French spirit is exactly what one had
+found oneself bewilderedly noting. There are two or three rather big
+felicities and sanities of judgment (in this order;) in one place a fine
+strong rightly-discriminated apprehension and characterisation of Victor
+Hugo. But for the rest such queer lapses and wanderings wild; with the
+striking fact, above all, that he scarcely once in the 2 volumes makes
+use of a French phrase or ventures on a French passage (as in sundry
+occasional notes of acknowledgment and other like flights,) without some
+marked inexpertness or gaucherie. Three or four of these things are even
+painful--they cause one uncomfortably to flush. And he appears to have
+gone to France, thanks to his second wife's connections there, putting
+in little visits and having contacts, of a scattered sort, much oftener
+than I supposed. He "went abroad," for that matter, during certain
+years, a good deal more than I had fancied him able to--which is an
+observation I find, even now, of much comfort. But one's impression of
+his lack of what it's easiest to call, most comprehensively, aesthetic
+curiosity, is, I take it, exactly what you will have expressed your
+sense of. He speaks a couple of times of greatly admiring a novel of
+Daudet's, "Numa Roumestan," with the remark, twice over, that he has
+never "liked" any of the others; he only "likes" this one! The tone is
+of the oddest, coming from a man of the craft--even though the terms on
+which he himself was of the craft remain so peculiar--and such as there
+would be so much more to say about. To a fellow-novelist who could read
+Daudet at all (and I can't imagine his not, in such a relation, being
+read with curiosity, with critical appetite) "Numa" might very well
+appear to stand out from the others as the finest flower of the same
+method; but not to take it as one of them, or to take them as of its
+family and general complexion, is to reduce "liking" and not-liking to
+the sort of use that a spelling-out schoolgirl might make of them. Most
+of all (if I don't bore you) I think one particular observation
+counts--or has counted for me; the fact of the non-occurrence of one
+name, _the_ one that aesthetic curiosity would have seemed scarce able,
+in any real overflow, to have kept entirely shy of; that of Balzac, I
+mean, which Meredith not only never once, even, stumbles against, but so
+much as seems to stray within possible view of. Of course one would
+never dream of measuring "play of mind," in such a case, by any man's
+positive mentions, few or many, of the said B.; yet when he _isn't_ ever
+mentioned a certain desert effect comes from it (at least it does to
+thirsty me) and I make all sorts of little reflections. But I am making
+too many now, and they are loose and casual, and you mustn't mind them
+for the present; all the more that I'm sorry to say I am still on shaky
+ground physically; this odious ailment not being, apparently, a thing
+that spends itself and clears off, but a beastly poison which hangs
+about, even after the most copious eruption and explosion, and suggests
+dismal relapses and returns to bed. I am really thinking of this latter
+form of relief even now--after having been up but for a couple of hours.
+However, don't "mind" me; even if I'm in for a real relapse _some_ of
+the sting will, I trust, have been drawn.
+
+/*
+Yours rather wearily,
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+P.S. I _am_ having, it appears--Sunday, 2 p.m.--to tumble back into bed;
+though I rose but at 10!
+
+
+
+
+_To Edmund Gosse._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+October 15th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Gosse,
+*/
+
+Here I am at it again--for I can't not thank you for your two notes last
+night and this morning received. Your wife has all my tenderest sympathy
+in the matter of what the loss of her Brother cost her. Intimately will
+her feet have learnt to know these ways. So it goes on till we have no
+one left to lose--as I felt, with force, two summers ago, when I lost my
+two last Brothers within two months and became sole survivor of all my
+Father's house. I lay my hand very gently on our friend.
+
+With your letter of last night came the Cornhill with the beautifully
+done little Swinburne chapter. What a "grateful" subject, somehow, in
+every way, that gifted being--putting aside even, I mean, the value of
+his genius. He is grateful by one of those arbitrary values that dear
+G.M., for instance, doesn't positively command, in proportion to his
+intrinsic weight; and who can say quite why? Charming and vivid and
+authentic, at any rate, your picture of that occasion; to say nothing of
+your evocation, charged with so fine a Victorian melancholy, of
+Swinburne's time at Vichy with Leighton, Mrs. Sartoris and Richard
+Burton; what a felicitous and enviable image they do make together--and
+what prodigious discourse must even more particularly have ensued when
+S. and B. sat up late together after the others! Distinct to me the
+memory of a Sunday afternoon at Flaubert's in the winter of '75-'76,
+when Maupassant, still _inedit_, but always "round," regaled me with a
+fantastic tale, irreproducible here, of the relations between two
+Englishmen, each other, and their monkey! A picture the details of which
+have faded for me, but not the lurid impression. Most deliciously
+Victorian that too--I bend over it all so yearningly; and to the effect
+of my hoping "ever so" that you are in conscious possession of material
+for a series of just such other chapters in illustration of S., each a
+separate fine flower for a vivid even if loose nosegay.
+
+I'm much interested by your echo of Haldane's remarks, or whatever,
+about G. M. Only the difficulty is, of a truth, somehow, that _ces
+messieurs_; he and Morley and Maxse and Stephen, and two or three
+others, Lady Ulrica included, really never knew much more where _they_
+were, on all the "aesthetic" ground, as one for convenience calls it,
+than the dear man himself did, or where _he_ was; so that the whole
+history seems a record somehow (so far as "art and letters" are in
+question) of a certain absence of point on the part of every one
+concerned in it. Still, it abides with us, I think, that Meredith was an
+admirable spirit even if not an _entire_ mind; he throws out, to my
+sense, splendid great moral and ethical, what he himself would call
+"spiritual," lights, and has again and again big strong whiffs of manly
+tone and clear judgment. The fantastic and the mannered in him were as
+nothing, I think, to the intimately sane and straight; just as the
+artist was nothing to the good citizen and the liberalised bourgeois.
+However, lead me not on! I thank you ever so kindly for the authenticity
+of your word about these beastly recurrences (of my disorder.) I feel
+you floated in confidence on the deep tide of Philip's experience and
+wisdom. Still, I _am_ trying to keep mainly out of bed again (after 48
+hours just renewedly spent in it.) But on these terms you'll wish me
+back there--and I'm yours with no word more,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edmund Gosse._
+
+/#
+ Mr. Gosse had asked for further details with regard to Maupassant's
+ tale, referred to in the previous letter. The legend in question
+ was connected with Etretat and the odd figure of George E. J.
+ Powell, Swinburne's host there during the summer of 1868, and more
+ than once afterwards.
+#/
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+October 17th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Gosse,
+*/
+
+It's very well invoking a close to this raging fever of a correspondence
+when you have such arts for sending and keeping the temperature up! I
+feel in the presence of your letter last night received that the little
+machine thrust under one's tongue may well now register or introduce the
+babble of a mind "affected"; though interestingly so, let me add, since
+it is indeed a thrill to think that I _am_ perhaps the last living
+depositary of Maupassant's wonderful confidence or legend. I really
+believe myself the last survivor of those then surrounding Gustave
+Flaubert. I shrink a good deal at the same time, I confess, under the
+burden of an honour "unto which I was not born"; or, more exactly,
+hadn't been properly brought up or pre-admonished and pre-inspired to. I
+pull myself together, I invoke fond memory, as you urge upon me, and I
+feel the huge responsibility of my office and privilege; but at the same
+time I must remind you of certain inevitable weaknesses in my position,
+certain essential infirmities of my relation to the precious fact
+(meaning by the precious fact Maupassant's having, in that night of time
+and that general failure of inspiring prescience, so remarkably regaled
+me.) You will see in a moment everything that was wanting to make me the
+conscious recipient of a priceless treasure. You will see in fact how
+little I could have _any_ of the right mental preparation. I didn't in
+the least know that M. himself was going to be so remarkable; I didn't
+in the least know that I was going to be; I didn't in the least know
+(and this was above all most frivolous of me) that _you_ were going to
+be; I didn't even know that the monkey was going to be, or even realise
+the peculiar degree and _nuance_ of the preserved lustre awaiting ces
+messieurs, the three taken together. Guy's story (he was only known as
+"Guy" then) dropped into my mind but as an unrelated thing, or rather as
+one related, and indeed with much intensity, to the peculiarly "rum,"
+weird, macabre and unimaginable light in which the interesting, or in
+other words the delirious, in English conduct and in English character,
+are--or were especially then--viewed in French circles sufficiently
+self-respecting to have views on the general matter at all, or in other
+words among the truly refined and enquiring. "Here they are at it!" I
+remember that as my main inward comment on Maupassant's vivid little
+history; which was thus thereby somehow more vivid to me about _him_,
+than about either our friends or the Monkey; as to whom, as I say, I
+didn't in the least foresee this present hour of arraignment!
+
+At the same time I think I'm quite prepared to say, in fact absolutely,
+that of the two versions of the tale, the two quite distinct ones, to
+which you attribute a mystic and separate currency over there,
+Maupassant's story to me was essentially Version No. I. It wasn't at all
+the minor, the comparatively banal anecdote. Really what has remained
+with me is but the note of two elements--that of the Monkey's jealousy,
+and that of the Monkey's death; how brought about the latter I can't at
+all at this time of day be sure, though I am haunted as with the vague
+impression that the poor beast figured as having somehow destroyed
+_himself_, committed suicide through the separate injuria formae. The
+third person in the fantastic complication was either a young man
+employed as servant (within doors) or one employed as boatman, and in
+either case I think English; and some thin ghost of an impression abides
+with me that the "jealousy" was more on the Monkey's part toward him
+than on his toward the Monkey; with which the circumstance that the
+Death I seem most (yet so dimly) to disembroil is simply and solely, or
+at least predominantly, that of the resentful and impassioned beast: who
+hovers about me as having seen the other fellow, the jeune anglais or
+whoever, installed on the scene after he was more or less lord of it,
+and so invade his province. You see how light and thin and confused are
+my data! _How_ I wish I had known or guessed enough in advance to be
+able to oblige you better now: not a stone then would I have left
+unturned, not an i would I have allowed to remain undotted; no analysis
+or exhibition of the national character (of _either_ of the national
+characters) so involved would I have failed to catch in the act. Yet I
+do so far serve you, it strikes me, as to be clear about _this_--that,
+whatever turn the denouement took, whichever life was most luridly
+sacrificed (of those of the two humble dependants), the drama had
+essentially been one of the affections, the passions, the last
+_cocasserie_, with each member of the quartette involved! Disentangle it
+as you can--I think Browning alone could really do so! Does this at any
+rate--the best I can do for you--throw any sufficient light? I recognise
+the importance, the historic bearing and value, of the most perfectly
+worked-out view of it. _Such_ a pity, with this, that as I recover the
+fleeting moments from across the long years it is my then active
+figuration of the so tremendously _averti_ young Guy's intellectual,
+critical, vital, experience of the subject-matter that hovers before me,
+rather than my comparatively detached curiosity as to the greater or
+less originality of ces messieurs!--even though, with this, highly
+original they would appear to have been. I seem moreover to mix up the
+occasion a little (I mean the occasion of that confidence) with another,
+still more dim, on which the so communicative Guy put it to me, apropos
+of I scarce remember what, that though he had remained quite outside of
+the complexity I have been glancing at, some jeune anglais, in some
+other connection, had sought to draw him into some scarcely less
+fantastic or abnormal one, to the necessary determination on his part of
+some prompt and energetic action to the contrary: the details of which
+now escape me--it's all such a golden blur of old-time Flaubertism and
+Goncourtism! How many more strange flowers one _might_ have gathered up
+and preserved! There was something from Goncourt one afternoon about
+certain Swans (they seem to run so to the stranger walks of the animal
+kingdom!) who figured in the background of some prodigious British
+existence, and of whom I seem to recollect there is some faint recall in
+"La Faustin" (not, by the way, "_Le_ Faustin," as I think the printer
+has betrayed you into calling it in your recent Cornhill paper.) But the
+golden blur swallows up everything, everything but the slow-crawling,
+the too lagging, loitering amendment in my tiresome condition,
+out-distanced by the impatient and attached spirit of yours all
+faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES,
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To H. G. Wells._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+October 18th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Wells,
+*/
+
+I have been sadly silent since having to wire you (nearly three weeks
+ago) my poor plea of inability to embrace your so graceful offer of an
+occasion for my at last meeting, in accordance with my liveliest desire,
+the eminent Arnold Bennett; sadly in fact is a mild word for it, for I
+have cursed and raged, I have almost irrecoverably suffered--with all of
+which the end is not yet. I had just been taken, when I answered your
+charming appeal, with a violent and vicious attack of "Shingles"--under
+which I have lain prostrate till this hour. I don't shake it off--and
+perhaps you know how fell a thing it may be. I am precariously "up" and
+can do a little to beguile the black inconvenience of loss of time at a
+most awkward season by dealing after this graceless fashion with such
+arrears of smashed correspondence as I may so presume to patch up; but I
+mayn't yet plan for the repair of other losses--I see no hope of my
+leaving home for many days, and haven't yet been further out of this
+house than to creep feebly about my garden, where a blest season has
+most fortunately reigned. A couple of months hence I go up to town to
+stay (I have taken a lease of a small unfurnished flat in Chelsea, on
+the river;) and there for the ensuing five or six months I shall aim at
+inducing you to bring the kind Bennett, whom I meanwhile cordially and
+ruefully greet, to partake with me of some modest hospitality.
+
+Meanwhile if I've been deprived of you on one plane I've been living
+with you very hard on another; you may not have forgotten that you
+kindly sent me "Marriage" (as you always so kindly render me that valued
+service;) which I've been able to give myself to at my less afflicted
+and ravaged hours. I have read you, as I always read you, and as I read
+no one else, with a complete abdication of all those "principles of
+criticism," canons of form, preconceptions of felicity, references to
+the idea of method or the sacred laws of composition, which I roam,
+which I totter, through the pages of others attended in some dim degree
+by the fond yet feeble theory of, but which I shake off, as I advance
+under your spell, with the most cynical inconsistency. For under your
+spell I do advance--save when I pull myself up stock still in order not
+to break it with so much as the breath of appreciation; I live with you
+and in you and (almost cannibal-like) _on_ you, on you H. G. W., to the
+sacrifice of your Marjories and your Traffords, and whoever may be of
+their company; not your treatment of them, at all, but, much more, their
+befooling of you (pass me the merely scientific expression--I mean your
+fine high action in view of the red herring of lively interest they
+trail for you at their heels) becoming thus of the essence of the
+spectacle for me, and nothing in it all "happening" so much as these
+attestations of your character and behaviour, these reactions of yours
+as you more or less follow them, affect me as vividly happening. I see
+you "behave," all along, much more than I see them even when they
+behave (as I'm not sure they behave _most_ in "Marriage") with whatever
+charged intensity or accomplished effect; so that the ground of the
+drama is somehow most of all the adventure for _you_--not to say of
+you--the moral, temperamental, personal, expressional, of your setting
+it forth; an adventure in fine more appreciable to me than any of those
+you are by way of letting _them_ in for. I don't say that those you let
+them in for don't interest me too, and don't "come off" and people the
+scene and lead on the attention, about as much as I can do with; but
+only, and always, that you beat them on their own ground and that your
+"story," through the five hundred pages, says more to me than theirs.
+You'll find this perhaps a queer rigmarole of a statement, but I ask you
+to allow for it just now as the mumble, at best, of an invalid; and wait
+a little till I can put more of my hand on my sense. Mind you that the
+restriction I may seem to you to lay on my view of your work still
+leaves that work more convulsed with life and more brimming with blood
+than any it is given me nowadays to meet. The point I have wanted to
+make is that I find myself absolutely unable, and still more unwilling,
+to approach you, or to take leave of you, in any projected light of
+criticism, in any judging or concluding, any comparing, in fact in any
+aesthetic or "literary" relation at all; and this in spite of the fact
+that the light of criticism is almost that in which I most fondly bask
+and that the amusement I consequently renounce is one of the dearest of
+all to me. I simply decline--that's the way the thing works--to pass you
+again through my cerebral oven for critical consumption: I consume you
+crude and whole and to the last morsel, cannibalistically, quite, as I
+say; licking the platter clean of the last possibility of a savour and
+remaining thus yours abjectly,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Humphry Ward._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+October 22nd, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Mary Ward,
+*/
+
+Having to acknowledge in this cold-blooded form so gracious a favour as
+your kind letter just received is so sorry a business as to tell at once
+a sad tale of the stricken state. I have been laid up these three weeks
+with an atrocious visitation of "Shingles," as the odious ailment is so
+vulgarly and inadequately called--the medical _herpes zonalis_ meeting
+much better the malign intensity of the case--and the end is not yet. I
+am still most sore and sorry and can but work off in this fashion a
+fraction of my correspondence. C'est assez vous dire that I can make no
+plan for any social adventure within any computable time. Forgive my
+taking this occasion to add further and with that final frankness that
+winds up "periods of life" and earthly stages, as it were, that I feel
+the chapter of social adventure now forever closed, and that I must go
+on for the rest of my days, such as that rest may be, only _tout
+doucement_, as utterly doucement as can possibly be managed. I am aged,
+infirm, hideously unsociable and utterly detached from any personal
+participation in the political game, to which I am naturally and from
+all circumstances so alien here, and which forms the constant carnival
+of all you splendid young people. Don't take this unamiable statement,
+please, for a profession of relaxed attachment to any bright individual,
+or least of all to any valued old friends; but just pardon my dropping
+it, as I pass, in the interest of the great pusillanimity that I find it
+important positively to cultivate--even at the risk of affecting you as
+solemn and pompous and ridiculous. I will admit to you (should you be
+so gently patient as to be moved in the least to contend with me) that
+this prolonged visitation of pain doesn't suggest to one views of future
+ease of any kind. I have none the less a view of coming up to town, for
+the rest of the winter, as soon as possible after Christmas; and I
+reserve the social adventure of tea in Grosvenor Place--effected with
+impunity--as the highest crown of my confidence. I shall trust you then
+to observe how exactly those charming conditions may seem suited to my
+powers. I'm delighted to know meanwhile that you have finished a gallant
+piece of work, which is more than I can say of myself after a whole
+summer of stiff frustration; for my current complaint is but the
+overflow of the bucket. Just see how your great goodnature has exposed
+you to that spatterment! But I pull up--this is too lame a gait; and am
+yours all not less faithfully than feebly,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Humphry Ward._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+October 24th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Mary Ward,
+*/
+
+I feel I _must_ really thank you afresh, even by the freedom of this
+impersonal mechanism, for your renewed expression of kindness--very
+soothing and sustaining to me in my still rather dreary case. I am doing
+my utmost to get better, but the ailment has apparently endless secrets
+of its own for preventing that; an infernal player with still another
+and another vicious card up his sleeve. This is precisely why your
+generous accents touch me--making me verily yearn as I think of the balm
+I should indeed find in talking with you of the latest products of
+those producers (few though they be) who lend themselves in a degree to
+remark. I have but within a day or two permitted myself a modicum of
+remark to H.G. Wells--who had sent me "Marriage"; but I should really
+rather have addressed the quantity to you, on whom it's not so important
+I should make my impression. I mean I should be in your case
+comparatively irrelevant--whereas in his I feel myself relevant only to
+be by the same stroke, as it were, but vain and ineffectual. Strange to
+me--in his affair--the coexistence of so much talent with so little art,
+so much life with (so to speak) so little living! But of him there is
+much to say, for I really think him more interesting by his faults than
+he will probably ever manage to be in any other way; and he is a most
+vivid and violent object-lesson. But it's as if I were pretending to
+talk--which, for this beastly frustration, I am not. I envy you the
+quite ideal and transcendent jollity (as if Marie Corelli had herself
+evoked the image for us) of having polished off a brilliant _coup_ and
+being on your way to celebrate the case in Paris. It's for me to-day as
+if people only did these things in Marie--and in Mary! Do while you are
+there re-enter, if convenient to you, into relation with Mrs. Wharton;
+if she be back, that is, from the last of her dazzling, her incessant,
+braveries of far excursionism. You may in that case be able to appease a
+little my always lively appetite for news of her. Don't, I beseech you,
+"acknowledge" in any manner this, with all you have else to do; not even
+to hurl back upon me (in refutation, reprobation or whatever) the charge
+I still persist in of your liking "politics" because of your all having,
+as splendid young people, the perpetual good time of being so intimately
+_in_ them. They never cease to remind me personally, here (close
+corporation or intimate social club as they practically affect the aged
+and infirm, the lone and detached, the abjectly literary and unenrolled
+alien as being,) that one must sacrifice all sorts of blest freedoms and
+immunities, treasures of detachment and perception that make up for the
+"outsider" state, on any occasion of practical approach to circling
+round the camp; for penetration into which I haven't a single one of
+your pass-words--yours, I again mean, of the splendid young lot. But
+don't pity me, all the same, for this picture of my dim exclusion; it is
+so compatible with more _other_ initiations than I know, on the whole,
+almost what to do with. I hear the pass-words given--for it does happen
+that they sometimes reach my ear; and then, so far from representing for
+me the "salt of life," as you handsomely put it, they seem to form for
+me the very measure of intellectual insipidity. All of which, however,
+is so much more than I meant to be led on to growl back at your perfect
+benevolence. Still, still, still--well, _still_ I am harmoniously yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+TO GAILLARD T. LAPSLEY.
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+October 24th, 1912.
+
+My dear grand Gaillard,
+*/
+
+I seem to do nothing just now but hurl back gruff refusals at gracious
+advances--and all in connection with the noble shades and the social
+scenes you particularly haunt. I wrote Howard S. last night that I
+couldn't, for weary dreary reasons, come to meet you at Qu'acre; and now
+I have just polished off (by this mechanical means, to which, for the
+time, I'm squalidly restricted) the illustrious Master of Magdalene, who
+artfully and insidiously backed by your scarce less shining self, has
+invited me to exhibit my battered old person and blighted old wit on
+some luridly near day in those parts. I have had to refuse him, though
+using for the purpose the most grovelling language; and I have now to
+thank you, with the same morbid iridescence of form and the same
+invincible piggishness of spirit, for your share in the large appeal.
+Things are complicated with me to the last degree, please believe, at
+present; and the highest literary flights I am capable of are these vain
+_gestes_ from the dizzy edge of the couch of pain. I have been this
+whole month sharply ill--under an odious visitation of "Shingles"; and
+am not yet free or healed or able; not at all on my feet or at my ease.
+It has been a most dismal summer for me, for, after a most horrid and
+undermined July and August, I had begun in September to face about to
+work and hope, when this new plague of Egypt suddenly broke--to make
+confusion worse confounded. I am up to my neck in arrears, disabilities,
+and I should add despairs--were my resolution not to be beaten, however
+battered, not so adequate, apparently, to my constitutional presumption.
+Meanwhile, oh yes, I am of course as bruised and bored, as deprived and
+isolated, and even as indignant, as you like. But that I still can be
+indignant seems to kind of promise; perhaps it's a symptom of dawning
+salvation. The great thing, at any rate, is for you to understand that I
+look forward to being fit within no _calculable_ time either to prance
+in public or prattle in private, and that I grieve to have nothing
+better to tell you. Very charming and kind to me your own news from
+la-bas. I won't attempt to do justice now to "all that side." I sent
+Howard last night some express message to you--which kindly see that he
+delivers. We shall manage something, all the same, yet, and I am all
+faithfully yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To John Bailey._
+
+/#
+ The following refers to the offer, transmitted by Mr. Bailey, of
+ the chairmanship of the English Association.
+#/
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+November 11th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear John,
+*/
+
+Forgive (and while you are about it please commiserate) my having to
+take this roundabout way of acknowledging your brave letter. I am
+stricken and helpless still--I can't sit up like a gentleman and drive
+the difficult pen. I am having an absolutely horrid and endless
+visitation--being now in the seventh week of the ordeal I had the other
+day to mention to you. It's a weary, dreary business, perpetual
+atrocious suffering, and you must pardon my replying to you as I can and
+not at all as I would. And I speak here, I have, alas, to say, not of my
+form of utterance only--for my matter (given that of your own charming
+appeal) would have in whatever conditions to be absolutely the same. Let
+me, for some poor comfort's sake, make the immediate rude jump to the
+one possible truth of my case: it is out of my power to meet your
+invitation with the least decency or grace. When one declines a
+beautiful honour, when one simply sits impenetrable to a generous and
+eloquent appeal, one had best have the horrid act over as soon as
+possible and not appear to beat about the bush and keep up the fond
+suspense. For me, frankly, my dear John, there is simply no question of
+these things: I am a mere stony, ugly monster of _Dis_sociation and
+Detachment. I have never in all my life gone in for these other things,
+but have dodged and shirked and successfully evaded them--to the best
+of my power at least, and so far as they have in fact assaulted me: all
+my instincts and the very essence of any poor thing that I might, or
+even still may, trump up for the occasion as my "genius" have been
+against them, and are more against them at this day than ever, though
+two or three of them (meaning by "them" the collective and congregated
+bodies, the splendid organisations, aforesaid) have successfully got
+their teeth, in spite of all I could do, into my bewildered and badgered
+antiquity. And this last, you see, is just one of the _reasons_--! for
+my not collapsing further, not exhibiting the last demoralisation, under
+the elegant pressure of which your charming plea is so all but dazzling
+a specimen. I can't go into it all much in this sorry condition (a bad
+and dismal one still, for my ailment is not only, at the end of so many
+weeks, as "tedious" as you suppose, but quite fiendishly painful into
+the bargain)--but the rough sense of it is that I believe only in
+absolutely independent, individual and lonely virtue, and in the
+serenely unsociable (or if need be at a pinch sulky and sullen) practice
+of the same; the observation of a lifetime having convinced me that no
+fruit ripens but under that temporarily graceless rigour, and that the
+associational process for bringing it on is but a bright and hollow
+artifice, all vain and delusive. (I speak here of the Arts--or of my own
+poor attempt at one or two of them; the other matters must speak for
+themselves.) Let me even while I am about it heap up the measure of my
+grossness: the mere dim vision of presiding or what is called, I
+believe, taking the chair, at a speechifying public dinner, fills me,
+and has filled me all my life, with such aversion and horror that I have
+in the most odious manner consistently refused for years to be present
+on such occasions even as a guest pre-assured of protection and
+effacement, and have not departed from my grim consistency even when
+cherished and excellent friends were being "offered" the banquet. I have
+at such times let them know in advance that I was utterly not to be
+counted on, and have indeed quite gloried in my shame; sitting at home
+the while and gloating over the fact that I wasn't present. In fine the
+revolution that my pretending to lend myself to your noble combination
+would propose to make in my life is unthinkable save as a convulsion
+that would simply end it. This then must serve as my answer to your
+kindest of letters--until at some easier hour I am able to make you a
+less brutal one. I know you would, or even will wrestle with me, or at
+least feel as if you would like to; and I won't deny that to converse
+with you on any topic under the sun, and even in a connection in which I
+may appear at my worst, can never be anything but a delight to me. The
+idea of such a delight so solicits me, in fact, as I write, that if I
+were only somewhat less acutely laid up, and free to spend less of my
+time in bed and in anguish, I would say at once: Do come down to lunch
+and dine and sleep, so that I may have the pleasure of you in spite of
+my nasty attitude. As it is, please let me put it thus: that as soon as
+I get sufficiently better (if I ever do at this rate) to rise to the
+level of even so modest an hospitality as I am at best reduced to, I
+_will_ appeal to you to come and partake of it, in your magnanimity, to
+that extent: not to show you that I am not utterly adamant, but that for
+private association, for the banquet of _two_ and the fellowship of
+_that_ fine scale, I have the best will in the world. We shall talk so
+much (and, I am convinced in spite of everything, so happily) that I
+won't say more now--except that I venture all the same to commend myself
+brazenly to Mrs. John, and that I am yours all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Dr. J. William White._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+November 14th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear William,
+*/
+
+I am reduced for the present to this graceless machinery, but I would
+rather use it "on" you than let your vivid letter pass, under stress of
+my state, and so establish a sad precedent: since you know I _never_ let
+your letters pass. I have been down these seven weeks with an atrocious
+and apparently absolutely endless attack of "Shingles"--herpes zonalis,
+you see I know!--of the abominable nature of which, at their worst, you
+will be aware from your professional experience, even if you are not, as
+I devoutly hope, by your personal. I have been having a simple hell
+(saving Letitia's presence) of a time; for at its worst (and a
+mysterious providence has held me worthy only of _that_) the pain and
+the perpetual distress are to the last degree excruciating and wearing.
+The end, moreover, is not yet: I go on and on--and feel as if I might
+for the rest of my life--or _would_ honestly so feel were it not that I
+have some hope of light or relief from an eminent specialist ... who has
+most kindly promised to come down from London and see me three days
+hence. My good "local practitioner" has quite thrown up the sponge--he
+can do nothing for me further and has welcomed a consultation with an
+alacrity that speaks volumes for his now at last quite voided state.
+
+This is a dismal tale to regale you with--accustomed as even you are to
+dismal tales from me; but let it stand for attenuation of my [failure]
+to enter, with any lightness of step, upon the vast avenue of
+complacency over which you invite me to advance to some fonder
+contemplation of Mr. Roosevelt. I must simply state to you, my dear
+William, that I can't so much as _think_ of Mr. Roosevelt for two
+consecutive moments: he has become to me, these last months, the mere
+monstrous embodiment of unprecedented resounding Noise; the steps he
+lately took toward that effect--of presenting himself as the noisiest
+figure, or agency of any kind, in the long, dire annals of the human
+race--having with me at least so consummately succeeded. I can but see
+him and hear him and feel him as raging sound and fury; and if ever a
+man was in a phase of his weary development, or stage of his persistent
+decline (as you will call it) or crisis of his afflicted nerves (which
+you will say I deserve), _not_ to wish to roar with that Babel, or to be
+roared at _by_ it, that worm-like creature is your irreconcileable
+friend. Let me say that I haven't yet read your Eulogy of the monster,
+as enclosed by you in the newspaper columns accompanying your
+letter--this being a bad, weak, oppressed and harassed moment for my
+doing so. You see the savagery of last summer, thundering upon our
+tympanums (pardon me, tympana) from over the sea, has left such scars,
+such a jangle of the auditive nerve (am I technically right?) as to make
+the least menace of another yell a thing of horror. I don't mean, dear
+William, that I suppose _you_ yell--my auditive nerve cherishes in spite
+of everything the memory of your vocal sweetness; but your bristling
+protege has but to peep at me from over your shoulder to make me clap my
+hands to my ears and bury my head in the deepest hollow of that pile of
+pillows amid which I am now passing so much of my life. However, I must
+now fall back upon them--and I rejoice meanwhile in those lines of your
+good letter in which you give so handsome an account of your own
+soundness and (physical) saneness. I take this, fondly, too, for the
+picture of Letitia's "form"--knowing as I do with what inveterate
+devotion she ever forms herself _upon_ you. I embrace you both, my dear
+William--so far as you consent to my abasing you (and abasing Letitia,
+which is graver) to the pillows aforesaid, and am ever affectionately
+yours and hers,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edmund Gosse._
+
+/#
+ Mr. Gosse's volume was his _Portraits and Sketches_, just
+ published.
+#/
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+November 19th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Gosse,
+*/
+
+I received longer ago than I quite like to give you chapter and verse
+for your so-vividly interesting volume of literary Portraits; but you
+will have (or at least I earnestly beg you to have) no reproach for my
+long failure of acknowledgment when I tell you that my sorry state,
+under this dire physical visitation, has unintermittently continued, and
+that the end, or any kind of real break in a continuity of quite
+damnable pain, has still to be taken very much on trust. I am now in my
+8th week of the horrible experience, which I have had to endure with
+remarkably little medical mitigation--really with none worth speaking
+of. Stricken and helpless, therefore, I can do but little, to this
+communicative tune, on any one day; which has been also the more the
+case as my admirable Secretary was lately forced to be a whole fortnight
+absent--when I remained indeed without resource. I avail myself for this
+snatch of one of the first possible days, or rather hours, since her
+return. But I read your book, with lively "reactions," within the first
+week of its arrival, and if I had then only had you more within range
+should have given you abundantly the benefit of my impressions, making
+you more genial observations than I shall perhaps now be able wholly to
+recover. I recover perfectly the great one at any rate--it is that each
+of the studies has extraordinary individual life, and that of Swinburne
+in particular, of course, more than any image that will ever be
+projected of him. This is a most interesting and charming paper, with
+never a drop or a slackness from beginning to end. I can't help wishing
+you had proceeded a little further _critically_--that is, I mean, in the
+matter of appreciation of his essential stuff and substance, the
+proportions of his mixture, etc.; as I should have been tempted to say
+to you, for instance, "Go into that a bit now!" when you speak of the
+early setting-in of his arrest of development etc. But this may very
+well have been out of your frame--it might indeed have taken you far;
+and the space remains wonderfully filled-in, the figure all-convincing.
+Beautiful too the Bailey, the Horne and the Creighton--this last very
+rich and fine and touching. I envy you your having known so well so
+genial a creature as Creighton, with such largeness of endowment. You
+have done him very handsomely and tenderly; and poor little Shorthouse
+not to the last point of tenderness perhaps, but no doubt as handsomely,
+none the less, as was conceivably possible. I won't deny to you that it
+was to your Andrew Lang I turned most immediately and with most
+suspense--and with most of an effect of drawing a long breath when it
+was over. It is very prettily and artfully brought off--but you would of
+course have invited me to feel with you how little you felt you were
+doing it as we should, so to speak, have "really liked." Of course there
+were the difficulties, and of course you had to defer in a manner to
+some of them; but your paper is of value just in proportion as you more
+or less overrode them. His recent extinction, the facts of long
+acquaintance and camaraderie, let alone the wonder of several of his
+gifts and the mass of his achievement, couldn't, and still can't, in his
+case, not he complicating, clogging and qualifying circumstances; but
+what a pity, with them all, that a figure so lending itself to a certain
+amount of interesting _real_ truthtelling, should, honestly speaking,
+enjoy such impunity, as regards some of its idiosyncrasies, should get
+off so scot-free ("Scot"-free is exactly the word!) on all the ground of
+its greatest hollowness, so much of its most "successful" puerility and
+perversity. Where I can't but feel that he _should_ be brought to
+justice is in the matter of his whole "give-away" of the value of the
+wonderful chances he so continually enjoyed (enjoyed thanks to certain
+of his very gifts, I admit!)--give-away, I mean, by his _cultivation_,
+absolutely, of the puerile imagination and the fourth-rate opinion, the
+coming round to that of the old apple-woman at the corner as after all
+the good and the right as to any of the mysteries of mind or of art. His
+mixture of endowments and vacant holes, and "the making of the part" of
+each, would by themselves be matter for a really edifying critical
+study--for which, however, I quite recognise that the day and the
+occasion have already hurried heedlessly away. And I perhaps throw a
+disproportionate weight on the whole question--merely by reason of a
+late accident or two; such as my having recently read his (in two or
+three respects so able) Joan of Arc, or Maid of France, and turned over
+his just-published (I think posthumous) compendium of "English
+Literature," which lies on my table downstairs. The extraordinary
+inexpensiveness and childishness and impertinence of this latter gave to
+my sense the measure of a whole side of Lang, and yet which was one of
+the sides of his greatest flourishing. His extraordinary _voulu_ Scotch
+provincialism crowns it and rounds it off really making one at moments
+ask with what kind of an innermost intelligence such inanities and
+follies were compatible. The Joan of Arc is another matter, of course;
+but even there, with all the accomplishment, all the possession of
+detail, the sense of reality, the vision of the truths and processes of
+life, the light of experience and the finer sense of history, seem to me
+so wanting, that in spite of the thing's being written so intensely _at_
+Anatole France, and in spite of some of A. F.'s own (and so different!)
+perversities, one "kind of" feels and believes Andrew again and again
+bristlingly yet _betement_ wrong, and Anatole sinuously, yet oh so
+wisely, right!
+
+However, all this has taken me absurdly far, and you'll wonder why I
+should have broken away at such a tangent. You had given me the
+opportunity, but it's over and I shall never speak again! I wish _you_
+would, all the same--since it may still somehow come your way. Your
+paper as it stands is a gage of possibilities. But good-bye--I can't in
+this condition keep anything up; scarce even my confidence that Time, to
+which I have been clinging, is going, after all to help. I had from
+Saturday to Sunday afternoon last, it is true, the admirably kind and
+beneficent visit of a London friend who happens to be at the same time
+the great and all-knowing authority and expert on Herpes; he was so
+angelic as to come down and see me, for 24 hours, thoroughly overhaul me
+and leave me with the best assurance and with, what is more to the
+point, a remedy very probably more effective than any yet vouchsafed to
+me.... When I do at last emerge I shall escape from these confines and
+come up to town for the rest of the winter. But I shall have to feel
+differently first, and it may not be for some time yet. It in fact
+can't _possibly_ be soon. You shall have then, at any rate, more
+news--"which," a la Mrs. Gamp, I hope your own has a better show to
+make.
+
+/*
+Yours all, and all faithfully,
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+P.S. I hope my last report on the little Etretat legend--it seems (not
+the legend but the report) of so long ago!--gave you something of the
+light you desired. And how I should have liked to hear about the Colvin
+dinner and its rich chiaroscuro. He has sent me his printed--charming, I
+think--speech: "the best thing he has done."
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Bigelow._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+November 21st, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Edith,
+*/
+
+It is interesting to hear from you on any ground--even when I am in the
+stricken state that this form of reply will suggest to you.... For a
+couple of hours in the morning I can work off letters in this way--this
+way only; but let the rest be silence, till I scramble somehow or other,
+if I ever do, out of my hole. Pray for me hard meanwhile--you and Baby,
+and even the ingenuous Young Man; pray for me with every form and rite
+of sacrifice and burnt-offering.
+
+As for the matter of your little request, it is of course easy, too
+easy, to comply with: why shouldn't you, for instance, just nip off my
+simple signature at the end of this and hand it to the artless
+suppliant? I call him by these bad names in spite of your gentle picture
+of him, for the simple reason that the time long ago, half a century
+ago, passed away when a request for one's autograph could affect one as
+anything but the cheapest and vaguest and emptiest "tribute" the
+futility of our common nature is capable of. I should like your young
+friend so much better, and believe so much more in his sentiments, if it
+exactly _hadn't_ occurred to him to put forth the _banal_ claim. My
+heart has been from far back, as I say, absolutely hard against it; and
+the rate at which it is (saving your presence) postally vomited forth is
+one of the least graceful features, one of the vulgarest and dustiest
+and poorest, of the great and glorious country beyond the sea. These
+ruthless words of mine will sufficiently explain to you why I indulge in
+no further flourish for our common admirer (for I'm _sure_ you share him
+with me!) than my few and bare terminal penstrokes here shall represent!
+Put him off with _them_--and even, if you like, read him my relentless
+words. Then if he winces, or weeps, or does anything nice and penitent
+and, above all, _intelligent_, press him to your bosom, pat him on the
+back (which you would so be in a position to do) and tell him to sin no
+more.
+
+What is much more interesting are your vivid little words about yourself
+and the child. I shall put them by, with your address upon them, till,
+emerging from my long tunnel, as God grant I may, I come up to town to
+put in the rest of the winter. I have taken the lease, a longish one, of
+a little flat in Chelsea, Cheyne Walk, which must now give me again a
+better place of London hibernation than I have for a long time had. It
+had become necessary, for life-saving; and as soon as I shall have
+turned round in it you must come and have tea with me and bring Baby and
+even the Ingenuous One, if my wild words haven't or don't turn his
+tender passion to loathing. I shall really like much to see him--and
+even send him my love and blessing. Even if I have produced in him a
+vindictive reaction I will engage to take him in hand and so gently
+argue with him (on the horrid autograph habit) that he will perhaps
+renew his generous vows! I shall have nothing to show _you_, later on,
+so charming as the rhythmic Butcher's or the musical Pub; only a dull
+inhuman view of the River--which, however, adds almost as much to my
+rent as I gather that your advantages add to yours! Yours all
+faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+P.S. I see the infatuated Youth is (on reading your note fondly over)
+not at your side (but "on the other side") and therefore not amenable to
+your Bosom (worse luck for him)--so I scrawl him my sign independently
+of this. But the moral holds!
+
+
+
+
+_To Robert C. Witt._
+
+/#
+ It will be remembered that the story of _The Outcry_ turns on the
+ fortunes of a picture attributed to "Il Mantovano."
+#/
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+November 27th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Sir,
+*/
+
+I am almost shocked to learn, through your appreciative note, that in
+imaginatively projecting, for use in "The Outcry," such a painter as the
+Mantovano, I unhappily coincided with an existing name, an artistic
+identity, a real one, with visible examples, in the annals of the art. I
+had never heard (in I am afraid my disgraceful ignorance) of the painter
+the two specimens of whom in the National Gallery you cite; and fondly
+flattered myself that I had simply excogitated, for its part in my
+drama, a name at once plausible, that is of good Italian type, and
+effective, as it were, for dramatic bandying-about. It was important,
+you see, that with the great claim that the story makes for my artist I
+should have a strictly supposititious one--with no awkward existing data
+to cast a possibly invidious or measurable light. So _my_ Mantovano was
+a creature of mere (convincing) fancy--and this revelation of my not
+having been as inventive as I supposed rather puts me out! But I owe it
+to you none the less that I shall be able--after I have recovered from
+this humiliation--to go and have a look at our N.G. interloper. I thank
+you for this and am faithfully yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+/#
+ Mrs. Wharton had sent him her recently published novel, _The Reef_.
+#/
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+December 4th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear E. W.
+*/
+
+Your beautiful book has been my portion these several days, but as other
+matters, of a less ingratiating sort, have shared the fair harbourage, I
+fear I have left it a trifle bumped and _bouscule_ in that at the best
+somewhat agitated basin. There it will gracefully ride the waves,
+however, long after every other temporarily floating object shall have
+sunk, as so much comparative "rot," beneath them. This is a rude figure
+for my sense of the entire interest and charm, the supreme validity and
+distinction, of The Reef. I am even yet, alas, in anything but a good
+way--so abominably does my ailment drag itself out; but it has been a
+real lift to read you and taste and ponder you; the experience has
+literally worked, at its hours, in a medicating sense that neither my
+local nor my London Doctor (present here in his greatness for a night
+and a day) shall have come within miles and miles of. Let me mention at
+once, and have done with it, that the advent and the effect of the
+intenser London light can only be described as an anticlimax, in fact as
+a tragic farce, of the first water; in short one of those _mauvais_
+tours, as far as results are concerned, that make one wonder how a
+Patient ever survives _any_ relation with a Doctor. My Visitor was
+charming, intelligent, kind, all visibly a great master of the question;
+but he prescribed me a remedy, to begin its action directly he had left,
+that simply and at a short notice sent me down into hell, where I lay
+sizzling (never such a sizzle before) for three days, and has since
+followed it up with another under the dire effect of which I languish
+even as I now write.... So much to express both what I owe you or _have_
+owed you at moments that at all lent themselves--in the way of pervading
+balm, and to explain at the same time how scantly I am able for the hour
+to make my right acknowledgment.
+
+There are fifty things I should like to say to you about the Book, and I
+shall have said most of them in the long run; but there are some that
+eagerly rise to my lips even now and for which I want the benefit of my
+"first flush" of appreciation. The whole of the finest part is, I think,
+quite the finest thing you have done; both _more_ done than even the
+best of your other doing, and more worth it through intrinsic value,
+interest and beauty.
+
+_December 9th._ I had to break off the other day, my dear Edith, through
+simple extremity of woe; and the woe has continued unbroken ever
+since--I have been in bed and in too great suffering, too unrelieved and
+too continual, for me to attempt any decent form of expression. I have
+just got up, for one of the first times, even now, and I sit in command
+of this poor little situation, ostensibly, instead of simply being
+bossed by it, though I don't at all know what it will bring. To attempt
+in this state to rise to any worthy reference to The Reef seems to me a
+vain thing; yet there remains with me so strongly the impression of its
+quality and of the unspeakably _fouillee_ nature of the situation
+between the two principals (more gone into and with more undeviating
+truth than anything you have done) that I can't but babble of it a
+little to you even with these weak lips. It all shows, partly, what
+strength of subject is, and how it carries and inspires, inasmuch as I
+think your subject in its essence [is] very fine and takes in no end of
+beautiful things to do. Each of these two figures is admirable for truth
+and _justesse_; the woman an exquisite thing, and with her
+characteristic finest, scarce differentiated notes (that is some of
+them) sounded with a wonder of delicacy. I'm not sure her oscillations
+are not beyond our notation; yet they are so held in your hand, so felt
+and known and shown, and everything seems so to come of itself. I suffer
+or worry a little from the fact that in the Prologue, as it were, we are
+admitted so much into the consciousness of the man, and that after the
+introduction of Anna (Anna so perfectly named) we see him almost only as
+she sees him--which gives our attention a different sort of work to do;
+yet this is really, I think, but a triumph of your method, for he
+remains of an absolute consistent verity, showing himself in that way
+better perhaps than in any other, and without a false note imputable,
+not a shadow of one, to his manner of so projecting himself. The beauty
+of it is that it is, for all it is worth, a Drama, and almost, as it
+seems to me, of the psychologic Racinian unity, intensity and gracility.
+Anna is really of Racine and one presently begins to feel her throughout
+as an Eriphyle or a Berenice: which, by the way, helps to account a
+little for something _qui me chiffonne_ throughout: which is why the
+whole thing, unrelated and unreferred save in the most superficial way
+to its _milieu_ and background, and to any determining or qualifying
+_entourage_, takes place _comme cela_, and in a specified, localised
+way, in France--these non-French people "electing," as it were, to have
+their story out there. This particularly makes all sorts of unanswered
+questions come up about Owen; and the notorious wickedness of Paris
+isn't at all required to bring about the conditions of the Prologue. Oh,
+if you knew how plentifully we could supply them in London and, I should
+suppose, in New York or in Boston. But the point was, as I see it, that
+you couldn't really give us the sense of a Boston Eriphyle or Boston
+Givre, and that an exquisite instinct, "back of" your Racinian
+inspiration and settling the whole thing for you, whether consciously or
+not, absolutely prescribed a vague and elegant French colonnade or
+gallery, with a French river dimly gleaming through, as the harmonious
+_fond_ you required. In the key of this, with all your reality, you have
+yet kept the whole thing: and, to deepen the harmony and accentuate the
+literary pitch, have never surpassed yourself for certain exquisite
+_moments_, certain images, analogies, metaphors, certain silver
+correspondences in your _facon de dire_; examples of which I could pluck
+out and numerically almost confound you with, were I not stammering this
+in so handicapped a way. There used to be little notes in you that were
+like fine benevolent finger-marks of the good George Eliot--the echo of
+much reading of that excellent woman, here and there, that is, sounding
+through. But now you are like a lost and recovered "ancient" whom _she_
+might have got a reading of (especially were he a Greek) and of whom in
+_her_ texture some weaker reflection were to show. For, dearest Edith,
+you are stronger and firmer and finer than all of them put together; you
+go further and you say _mieux_, and your only drawback is not having the
+homeliness and the inevitability and the happy limitation and the
+affluent poverty, of a Country of your Own (_comme moi, par exemple_!)
+It makes you, this does, as you exquisitely say of somebody or something
+at some moment, elegiac (what penetration, what delicacy in your use
+there of the term!)--makes you so, that is, for the Racinian-serieux--but
+leaves you more in the desert (for everything else) that surrounds Apex
+City. But you will say that you're content with your lot; that the
+desert surrounding Apex City is quite enough of a dense crush for you,
+and that with the _colonnade_ and the gallery and the dim river you will
+always otherwise pull through. To which I can only assent--after such an
+example of pulling through as The Reef. Clearly you have only to pull,
+and everything will come.
+
+These are tepid and vain remarks, for truly I am helpless. I have had
+all these last days a perfect hell of an exasperation of my dire
+complaint, the 11th week of which begins to-day, and have arrived at the
+point really--the weariness of pain so great--of not knowing _a quel
+saint me vouer_. In this despair, and because "change" at any hazard and
+any cost is strongly urged upon me by both my Doctors, and is a part of
+the regular process of _denouement_ of my accursed ill, I am in all
+probability trying to scramble up to London by the end of this week,
+even if I have to tumble, howling, out of bed and go forth in my
+bedclothes. I shall go in this case to Garlant's Hotel, Suffolk Street,
+where you have already seen me, and not to my Club, which is impossible
+in illness, nor to my little flat (21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk,
+Chelsea, S.W.) which will not yet, or for another three or four weeks,
+be ready for me. The change to London may possibly do something toward
+breaking the spell: please pray hard that it shall. Forgive too my
+muddled accents and believe me, through the whole bad business, not the
+less faithfully yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To A. F. de Navarro._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+December 12th, 1912.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear delightful Tony,
+*/
+
+Your missive, so vivid and genial, reaches me, alas, at a time of long
+eclipse and depression, during which my faculties have been blighted, my
+body tortured, and my resources generally exhausted.... I tell you these
+dismal things to explain in the first place why I am reduced to
+addressing you by this graceless machinery (I haven't written a letter
+with my own poor hand for long and helpless weeks;) and in the second
+place why I bring to bear on your gentle composition an intelligence
+still clouded and weakened. But I have read it with sympathy, and I
+think I may say, most of all with envy; so haunted with pangs, while one
+tosses on the couch of pain--and mine has been, from the nature of my
+situation, a poor lone and unsurrounded pallet--all one's visionary and
+imaginative life; which one imputes, day by day, to happy people who
+frisk among fine old gardens and oscillate between Clubs of the Arts and
+Monuments of the Past. I am delighted that the Country Life people asked
+you for your paper, which I find ever so lightly and brightly done, with
+a touch as easy and practised as if you were the Darling of the Staff.
+That is in fact exactly what I hope your paper may make you--clearly
+you have the right sympathetic turn for those evocations, and I shall be
+glad to think of you as evoking again and again. I only wish you hadn't
+to deal this time with a house so amply modernised, in fact so renewed
+altogether, save for a false front or two (or rather for a true one with
+false sides and backs), as I gather Abbotswood to be. The irrepressible
+Lutyens rages about us here, known at a glance by that modern note of
+the archaic which has become the most banal form of our cleverness.
+There is nothing left for _me_ personally to like but the little mouldy
+nooks that Country Life is too proud to notice and everyone else
+(including the photographers) too rich to touch with their fingers of
+gold. I have too the inimitable old garden on my nerves; living here in
+a great garden county I have positively almost grown to hate flowers--so
+that only just now my poor contaminated little gardener is turning the
+biggest border I have (scarce bigger it is true than my large unshaven
+cheek) into a question, a begged question, of turf, so that we shall
+presently have "chucked" Flora altogether. Forgive, however, these
+morbid, _maussade_ remarks; the blue devils of a long illness still
+interposing, in their insistent attitude, between my vision and your
+beauty--in which I include Mary's, largely, and that of all the fine
+complexion of Broadway. I return your lucid sheets with this, but make
+out that, as you are to be in town only till Thursday p.m. (unless I am
+mistaken), they will reach you the sooner by my sending them straight
+home. My wish for their best luck go with them! I ought to mention that
+under extreme push of my Doctors (for I luxuriate in Two) I am seeking
+that final desperate remedy of a "change" which imposes itself at last
+in a long illness, to break into the vicious circle and dissipate the
+blight, by going up to town--almost straight out of bed and dangling my
+bedclothes about me. This will, I trust, smash the black spell. I have
+taken a small flat there ... on what appears to be a lease that will
+long survive me, and there I earnestly beg you to seek me as soon as may
+be after the new year. I am having first to crouch at an obscure hotel.
+I embrace you Both and am in much dilapidation but all fidelity yours
+always,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Henry James, junior._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+
+January 19th, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Harry,
+*/
+
+I wrote, very copiously, and I hope not worryingly at all (for I only
+meant to be reassuring) to your Mother yesterday, from whom I had had
+two beautiful unacknowledged letters within the last days or so:
+unacknowledged save for a cable, of a cheerful stamp, which I sent off
+to Irving Street about a week ago, and which will have been sent on to
+you. But all the while your most blest letter, written during your
+Christmas moment at Cambridge, has been for me a thing to be so grateful
+for that I must express to you something of it to-day--even at the risk
+of a glut of information. My long silence--since I came up to town,
+including, I mean, my pretty dismal weeks at that "Garlant's" of ill
+association--has had a great inevitability, from several causes; but
+into these I shall have gone to your Mother, whom I think I explicitly
+asked to send you on my letter, and I don't want to waste force in
+repetitions. It won't be repeating too much to say again what I said to
+her, even with extreme emphasis, that I feel singularly justified of
+this basis for my winter times in London; so much does it appear, now
+that the preliminary and just postliminary strain of it is over, the
+very best thing I could have done for myself. My southward position (as
+to the rooms I most use) immediately over the River is verily an
+"asset," and not even in the garden-room at L.H., of summer mornings,
+have I been better placed for work. With which, all the detail here is
+right and pleasant and workable; my servants extremely rejoice in
+it--but I _am_ too much repeating!... Above all, my forenoons being by
+the mercy of the Powers, whoever or whatever they are, my best time, I
+have got back to work, and, with my uncanny interest in it and zeal for
+it still unimpaired, feel that it must "mean something" that I am thus
+reserved, after many troubles, for a productive relation with it. The
+proof-sheets of "A Small Boy and Others" have been coming in upon me
+rapidly--all but the very last; and it ought, by the end of next month
+at furthest, to burst upon the world. Of course I shall have advance
+copies sent promptly to you and to Irving Street; but, with this, I
+intensely want you to take into account that the Book was written
+through all these months of hampering and baffling illness. It went so
+haltingly and worriedly even last winter (as distinguished from anything
+I was able to do in the summer and could get at all during the last
+afflicted three or four months,) last winter having really been a much
+more difficult time than I could currently confess to, or than dear Bill
+and Alice probably got any sense of. The point is at any rate that the
+Book is now, under whatever disadvantages, wholly done, and that if it
+seems "good" in spite of these, the proof of my powers, when my powers
+have really worked off more of the heritage of woe of the last three
+years, will be but the more substantial. A very considerable lot of
+"Notes of a Son etc." is done, and I am now practically back at it with
+this appearance of a free little field in spite of everything.... I
+welcome immensely (what I didn't mention to your Mother--waiting to do
+it thus) the valuable and delightful little collection received from you
+of your Grandfather's correspondence with Emerson. What beautiful and
+characteristic things in it and how I hope to be able to use the best of
+these, on your Grandfather's part at least. As regards Emerson's side of
+the matter I doubt whether I can do enough (in the way of extracts from
+him) to make it even necessary for me to apply to Edward for licence. I
+think I can hope but at the most to summarise, or give the sense of,
+some of Emerson's passages; the reason of this being my absolute
+presumable want of space. The Book will have to be a longer one than "A
+Small Boy," but even with this there must be limits involving
+suppressions and omissions. My own text I can't help attaching enough
+sense and importance and value to, not to want to keep that too utterly
+under, and I am more and more moved to give all of your Grandfather, on
+his vivid and original side, that I possibly can. Add to this all the
+application, of an illustrative kind, that I can't but see myself making
+of your Dad's letters, and I see little room for any one else's; though
+what I most deplore my meagre provision of is those of your Aunt Alice,
+written to our parents mainly during her times, and especially her final
+time, in Europe. The poverty of this resource cuts from under my feet
+almost all ground for doing much, as I had rather hoped in a manner to
+do, with her....
+
+_Jan. 23rd, 1913._ I have been unable to go on with this these several
+days, and yet also unwilling to let it go without saying a few more
+things I wanted--so the long letter I _have_ got off to your Mother will
+precede it by longer than I meant. I still write, under my disabilities
+of damaged body, with difficulty (I mean perform the act of writing,)
+but this is diminishing substantially though slowly--and I mainly
+mention it to extenuate these clumsy characters.
+
+My conditions (of situation etc.) here meanwhile (this winter)--I mean
+these admirable and ample two rooms southward over the River, so still
+and yet so animated--are ideal for work. Some other time I will explain
+it to you--so far as you won't have noted it for yourself--how and why
+it is that I come to be so little beforehand financially. My fatally
+interrupted production of fiction began it, six years or more ago--and
+that began, so utterly against my preconception of such an effect, when
+I addressed myself to the so much longer and more arduous and more
+fatal-to-everything-else preparation of my "edition" than had been
+measurable in advance. That long period cut dreadfully into current
+gains--through complete arrest of other current labour; and when it was
+at last ended I had only time to do two small books (The Finer Grain and
+The Outcry) before the disaster of my long illness of Jan. 1910
+descended upon me and laid a paralysis on everything. This hideous
+Herpetic episode and its developments have been of the absolute
+continuity of that, as they now make it (I hope), dire but departing
+Climax; and they have represented an interminable arrest of literary
+income (to speak of.) Now that I can look to apparently again getting
+back to decent continuity of work it becomes _vital_ for me to aim at
+returning to the production of the Novel, my departure from which, with
+its heart-breaking loss of time, was a catastrophe, a perversity and
+fatality, so little dreamed of by me or intended. I yearn for it
+intellectually, and with all the force of my "genius" and
+imagination--artistically in short--and only when this relation is
+renewed shall I be again on a normal basis. Only _how_ I want to
+complete "Notes of a Son and Brother" with the last perfection first!
+Which is what I shall, I trust, during the next three or four months do,
+with far greater rapidity than I have done the first Book--for all last
+winter and spring my forenoon, my working hours, were my worst, and for
+long times so bad, and my later ones the better, whereas it is now the
+other way round.
+
+_Jan. 28th._ I have had, alas, dearest Harry, to break this off and not
+take it up again--through blighted (bed-ridden) late afternoons and
+whole evenings--my only letter-writing time unless I steal precious
+dictation-hours from Miss Bosanquet and the Book.... My vitality, my
+still sufficient cluster of vital "assets," to say nothing of my will to
+live and to write, assert themselves in spite of everything. This is
+5.15 on a dismal wet afternoon; I have been out, but I came in again on
+purpose to get this off by to-morrow's, Wednesday's post. This apartment
+grows in grace--nothing really could have been better for me. I went
+into that long account, just above, of the reasons why through the
+frustration of fond Fiction I have (so much illness so aiding) sunk to
+this momentary _gene_, I wanted to tell you, as against the appearance
+of too squalid a helplessness--for an early return to fond fiction will
+alter everything.... But what an endless sordid, illegible appeal! Take
+it, dearest Harry, in all indulgence, from your lately so much-tried and
+perhaps a little nervously over-anxious (by the effect of so much
+suffering,) but all unconquered and devoted old Uncle,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+P.S. A beautiful letter from your Mother of Jan. 13th (on receipt of my
+cable) has just come in. All tenderest love.
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Grace Norton._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+Feb. 6th, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest old friend!
+*/
+
+Don't shudder, I beg you, at the sight of this grim legibility--even
+when you compare it with your own exquisite mastery of legibility
+without grimness! Let me down easily, in view of the long, the oh so
+much _too_ long, ordeal that has pressed on me, and that has so hampered
+and hindered and harrowed me, that almost any sort of making shift to
+project my sentiments to a distance is a sort of victory won, or patch
+of ground wrested, from darkness and the devil! I am slowly slowly
+getting better of an interminable complicated siege of pain and
+distress; but it has left me with arrears of every sort piled up around
+me like the wild fragments of some convulsion of Nature, and I pick my
+way, or grope it, or even feebly and fatally fail of it, as I best can.
+There are things that help, withal, and one of these has been to receive
+your all-benignant little letter of two days ago. I needn't reaffirm to
+you at this time of day that all your long patiences and fidelities, all
+your generosities and gallantries of always rallying yet again, are
+always more beautiful to me than I ever seem to have managed
+_punctually_ enough to help you, if need be, to feel--especially as of
+any such urgent "help" there need be no question now! You have had
+enough news of me from over your way, I infer, pretty dismal though it
+may have been, for me not to want fatuously to dose you with it (I mean
+given its bitter quality) further or at first hand; therefore let me
+rather convey to you at first hand that I am getting into distinctly
+less pitiful case.... I have been too complicated a sufferer for it to
+clear at every point at the same time; but the general sense is ever so
+much better--and I am going to ask of your charity to let Alice, over
+the way, see these yearning pages, for her better reassurance--even if I
+have after a fashion managed, just of late, to reassure her more
+directly. I want her to have all the testimony I can treat her, and, by
+the same token, my dear Grace, treat _you_ to.
+
+Your little letter breathes all your characteristic courage and
+philosophy--while, I confess, at the same time, it fills out--or rather
+perhaps, more exactly, further removes the veil from--my in its very
+nature vivid enough picture of your fairly august state of lone
+Cambridge survivorship. I admired you on that state at closer quarters
+winter before last--even though my testimony to my so doing was at that
+time, from poor physical interferences, hampered and awkward; but
+History is so interesting when one is able to follow with closeness a
+particular attaching strain of it that my imagination, my intention, my
+affection and fidelity, hang and hover about your own particular noble
+exhibition of it as intelligently (yes, my dear Grace, as intelligently,
+nothing less, I insist) as you could possibly desire or put up with!
+Your letter fills in again for me a passage or two of detail--so that I
+feel myself the more possessed and qualified.... What I mean is above
+all that even this imperfect snatch of talk with you is dear and blest
+to me, and that if by hook or by crook, and through whatever densities
+of medium and distance, I draw out a little the sense of relation with
+you, it will have been better than utter frustration. I look out here,
+while I thus communicate, from a bit of the old-time stretch of
+riverside Chelsea, my first far-away glimpse or sense of which has, like
+so many of my first London glimpses and senses (my very first of all, I
+mean,) a never-lost association with you and yours, or at least with
+yours and thereby with you: which means my having come here first of
+all, one day of the early spring of 1869, with Charles and Susan, they
+having in their kindness brought me to call with them on the great (_if_
+great!) and strange and more or less sinister D. G. Rossetti, whom
+Charles was in good relation with, difficult as that appeared already
+then to have become for most people, and my impression of whom on the
+occasion, with everything else of it, I have always closely retained.
+Part of it was just this impression of the really interesting and
+delightful old Thames-side Chelsea, over the admirable water-view of
+which these windows now hang--quite as if I had then secretly vowed to
+myself that some window of mine some day should. The River is more
+pompously embanked (making an admirable walk all the way to Westminster,
+of the most salutary value to me when I can at the soberest of paces
+attempt it;) but the sense of it all goes back, as I say, to my fond
+participation in that prehistoric Queen's Gate Terrace Winter. However,
+I am drenching you with numbered pages--I ask no credit for the
+number!--and I almost sit with you while you read them; not exactly
+watching for a glow of rapture on your face, but still, on the whole,
+seeing you take them, without a frown, for a good intention and a
+stopgap for something better. You tell me almost nothing of yourself,
+but all my sympathy and fidelity wait on you (sympathy always _can_ come
+in somewhere!) and I am yours, my dear Grace, always all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Henry White._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+Feb. 23rd, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear old Friend,
+*/
+
+Let this mechanic form and vulgar legibility notify you a little at the
+start that I am in rather a hampered and hindered state, and that that
+must plead both for my delay in acknowledging your dear faithful letter
+of the New Year time, and for my at last having to make the best of this
+too impersonal art.... I won't go into the history of my woes--all the
+more that I really hope I have shuffled the worst of them off. Even in
+this most recent form they have been part and parcel of the grave
+illness that overtook me as long ago as at the New Year, 1910, and with
+a very imperfect recovery from which I was struggling during those weary
+American months of winter-before-last when we planned so in vain that I
+should come to you in Washington. I have deeply regretted, ever since,
+my failure of that pleasure--all the more that I don't see it now as
+conceivably again within my reach. I am restored to this soil, for
+whatever may remain to me of my mortal career. The grand swing across
+the globe, which you and Harry will again nobly accomplish--again and
+yet again--now simply mocks at my weakness and my reduced resources.
+Besides, I am but too thankful to have a refuge in which _continuously_
+to crouch. Please fix well in your mind that continuity--as making it
+easy for you some day to find me here. The continuity is broken simply
+by my reverting to the country for the summer and autumn--a mere change
+from the blue bed to the brown, and then from the brown back again to
+this Thames-side perch, which I call the blue. I hang here, for six
+months, straight over the River and find it delightful and interesting,
+at once ever so quiet and ever so animated. The River has a quantity of
+picturesque and dramatic life and motion that one had never appreciated
+till one had thrown oneself on it _de confiance_. But it's another
+London, this old Chelsea of simplifications and sacrifices, from the
+world in which I so like to feel that I for so long lived more or less
+_with_ you. I feel somehow as much away from that now as you and Harry
+must feel amid your new Washington horizons--and it has of itself, for
+that matter, gone to pieces under the sweep of the big broom of Time,
+which has scattered it without ceremony. A few vague and altered relics
+of it occasionally dangle for a moment before me. I was going to say
+"cross my path"--but I haven't now such a thing as a path, or it goes
+such a very few steps. I try meanwhile to project myself in imagination
+into your Washington existence--and, besides your own allusions to it, a
+passing visit a few days since from Walter Berry helped me a little to
+fix the shining vision. W. B. had been, I gathered, but a day or two
+near you, and wasn't in possession of many particulars. Beyond this,
+too, though you shine to me you shine a bit fearfully--for I can't rid
+myself (in a world of Chelsea limits and fashions) of a sense of the
+_formidable_, the somehow--at least for the likes of _me_!--difficult
+and bristling and glaring, side of the American conditions. However, you
+of course lightly ride the whirlwind--or at any rate have only as much
+or as little of the storms as you will, and can pick out of it only such
+musical thunder-rolls and most purely playful forked lightnings as suit
+you best. What I mean is that here, after a fashion, a certain part of
+the work of discrimination and selection and primary clearing of the
+ground is already done for one, in a manner that enables one to begin,
+for one's self, further on or higher up; whereas over there I seemed to
+see myself, speaking only from my own experience, often beginning so
+"low down," just in that way of sifting and selecting, that all one's
+time went to it and one was spent before arriving at any very charming
+altitude. This you will find obscure, but study it well--though strictly
+in private, so as not to give me away as a sniffy critic. Heaven knows I
+indulge in the most remorseless habits of criticism _here_--even if I
+make no great public use of them, through the increasing privacy and
+antiquity of my life. I kind of wonder about the bearing of the queer
+Democratic regime that seems as yet so obscurely to loom upon any latent
+possibilities (that might have been) on Harry's and your "career"--just
+as I wonder what unutterable queerness may not, as a feature of the
+whole conundrum, "representatively" speaking, before long cause us all
+here to sit up and stare: one or two such startling rumours about the
+matter, I trust groundless, having already had something of that effect.
+But we must all wait, mustn't we? and I do indeed envy you both your so
+interesting opportunity for doing so, in a front box at the comedy, or
+tragedy, the fine old American show, that is, whatever turn it takes: it
+will all give you, these next months, so much to look at and talk about
+and expertly appreciate. Lord, how I wish I were in a state or situation
+to be dining with you to-night! I am dying, really, to see your
+House--which means alas that I shall die without doing so. No glimmer of
+a view of the new Presidential family as a White House group has come my
+way--so that I sit in darkness there as all around, and feel you can but
+say that it serves me right not to have managed my life
+better--especially with your grand example! Amen, amen!...
+
+I rejoice to hear of your having had your grand-children with you,
+though you speak, bewilderingly, as if they had leaped across the globe
+in happy exemption from parents--or a parent. However, nothing does
+surprise me now--almost any kind of globe-leaping affects me, in my
+_trou_, as natural, possible, nay probable! I pat Harry ever so
+affectionately on the back, I hold you both in the most affectionate
+remembrance, and am yours all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. William James._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+March 5th, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Alice,
+*/
+
+An extreme blessing to me is your dear letter from Montreal. I had
+lately much longed to hear from you--and when do I not?--and had sent
+you a message to that effect in writing to Harry a week ago. Really to
+have some of your facts and your current picture straight from yourself
+is better than anything else....
+
+I write you this in conditions that give me for the hour, this
+morning-hour, toward noon, such a sense of the possible beneficence of
+Climate, relenting ethereal mildness, so long and so far as one can at
+all come by it. We have been having, as I believe you have, a blessedly
+mild winter, and the climax at this moment is a kind of all uncannily
+premature May-day of softness and beauty. I sit here with my big south
+window open to the River, open wide, and a sort of healing balm of
+sunshine flooding the place. Truly I feel I did well for myself in
+perching--even thus modestly for a "real home"--just on this spot. My
+beginnings of going out again have consisted, up to to-day, in four
+successive excursions in a Bath-chair--every command of which resource
+is installed but little more than round the corner from me; and the
+Bath-chair habit or vice is, I fear, only too capable now of marking me
+for its own. This of course not "really"--my excellent legs are, thank
+heaven, still too cherished a dependence and resource and remedy to me
+in the long run, or rather in the long (or even the short) crawl; only,
+if you've never tried it, the B.C. has a sweet appeal of its own, for
+contemplative ventilation; and I builded better than I knew when I
+happened to settle here, just where, in all London, the long, long,
+smooth and really charming and beguiling Thames-side Embankment offers
+it a quite ideal course for combined publicity (in the sense of variety)
+and tranquillity (in the sense of jostling against nobody and nothing
+and not having to pick one's steps.) Add to this that just at hand,
+straight across the River, by the ample and also very quiet Albert
+Bridge, lies the large convenient and in its way also very beguiling
+Battersea Park: which you may but too unspeakably remember our making
+something of the circuit of with William on that day of the so troubled
+fortnight in London, after our return from Nauheim, when Theodate Pope
+called for us in her great car and we came first to just round the
+corner here, where he and I sat waiting together outside while you and
+she went into Carlyle's house. Every moment of that day has again and
+again pressed back upon me here--and how, rather suddenly, we had, in
+the park, where we went afterwards, to pull up, that is to turn and get
+back to the sinister little Symonds's as soon as possible. However. I
+don't know why I should stir that dismal memory. The way the "general
+location" seems propitious to me ought to succeed in soothing the nerves
+of association. This last I keep saying--I mean in the sense that,
+especially on such a morning as this, I quite adore this form of
+residence (this particular perch I mean) in order to make fully sure of
+what I have of soothing and reassuring to tell you.... Lamb House hangs
+before me from this simplified standpoint here as a rather complicated
+haze; but I tend, I truly feel, to overdo that view of it--and shan't
+_settle_ to any view at all for another year. It is the mere worriment
+of dragged-out unwellness that makes me see things in wrong dimensions.
+They right themselves perfectly at better periods. But I mustn't yet
+discourse too long: I am still under restriction as to uttering too much
+vocal sound; and I feel how guarding and nursing the vocal resource is
+beneficial and helpful. I don't speak to you of Harry--there would be
+too much to say and he must shine upon you even from N.Y. with so big a
+light of his own. I take him, and I take you all, to have been much
+moved by Woodrow Wilson's fine, and clearly so sincere, even if so
+partial and provisional address yesterday. It isn't he, but it is the so
+long and so deeply provincialised and diseducated and, I fear--in
+respect to individual activity and operative, that is administrative
+value--very below-the-mark "personalities" of the Democratic party, that
+one is pretty dismally anxious about. An administration that has to
+"take on" Bryan looks, from the overhere point of view, like the
+queerest and crudest of all things! But of course I may not know what
+I'm talking about save when I thus embrace you all, almost principally
+Peg--_and_ your Mother!--again and am your ever affectionate
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Bruce Porter._
+
+/#
+ The beginning and end of this letter are accidentally missing.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+[March, 1913.]
+*/
+
+...a better one than for a long, long while; and it enables this poor
+scrawl thus to try to hang itself, for the hour, however awkwardly,
+round your neck. What was wonderful and beautiful in your letter of last
+November 9th (now so handsomely and liveably before me--I adore your
+hand) is that it was prompted, to the last perfection, by a sublime
+sense of what was just exactly my case at that hour, so that when I
+think of this, and of how I felt it when the letter came, and of how
+exquisite and interesting that essential fact made it (over and above
+its essential charm,) I don't know whether I am most amazed or ashamed
+at my not having as nearly as possible just then and there acclaimed the
+touching marvel. But in truth this very fact of the _justesse_ of your
+globe-spanning divination is the real answer to that. You wrote because
+you so beautifully and suddenly _saw_ from afar (and so admirably wanted
+to lay your hand on me in consequence:) saw, I mean, that I was in some
+acute trouble, and had the heavenly wish to signal to me your
+sympathetic sense of it. So, as I say, your admirable page itself tells
+me, and so at the hour I hailed the sweet phenomenon. I had had a very
+bad summer, but hoped (and supposed) I was more or less throwing it off.
+But the points I make are, 1st, that your psychic sense of the situation
+had absolutely coincided in time, and in California, with what was going
+on at Lamb House, on the other side of the globe; and 2nd, after all,
+that precisely the condition so revealed to you was what made it too
+difficult for me to vibrate back to you with any proportionate
+punctuality or grace. Only _this_, you see, is my long-delayed and
+comparatively dull vibration. Here I am, at any rate, dearest Bruce,
+taking you as straight again to my aged heart as these poor clumsy
+methods will allow. Thank God meanwhile I have no supernatural fears
+about _you_! nor vain dreams that you are not in the living equilibrium,
+now as ever, that becomes you best, and of which you have the brave
+secret. I am incapable of doubting of this--though after all I now feel
+how exceedingly I should like you to tell me so even if but on one side
+of a sheet like this so handsome (I come back to that!) example that I
+have before me. You can do so much with one side of a sheet. But oh for
+a better approach to a real personal _jaw_! It is indeed most strange,
+this intimate relation of ours that has been doomed to consist of a
+grain of contact (_et encore!_) to a ton of separation. It's to the
+honour of us anyhow that we _can_ and do keep touching without the more
+platitudinous kind of demonstration of it. Still--demonstrate, as I say,
+for three minutes. Feel a little, to help you to it, how tenderly I lay
+my hands on you. This address will find me till the end of June--but
+Lamb House of course always. I have taken three or four (or five) years'
+lease of a small flat on this pleasant old Chelsea riverside to
+hibernate in for the future. I return to the country for five or six
+months of summer and autumn, but can't stand the utter solitude and
+confinement of it from December to the spring's end. Ah, had we only a
+climate!--yours or Fanny Stevenson's (if she is still the exploiter of
+climates)--I believe I should be all right then! Tell me of her--and
+tell me of your Mother. I am sending you by the Scribners a volume of
+reminiscential twaddle....
+
+
+
+
+_To Lady Ritchie._
+
+/#
+ Lady Ritchie had at this time thoughts (afterwards abandoned) of
+ going to America. She was the "Princess Royal," of course, as the
+ daughter of Thackeray.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+March 25th, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest old Friend!
+*/
+
+I am deeply interested and touched by your letter from the Island!--so
+much so that I shall indeed rush to you this (day-after-to-morrow)
+Thursday at 5.15. Your idea is (as regards your sainted Self!) of the
+bravest and most ingenious, but needing no end of things to be said
+about it--and I think I shall be able to say them _ALL_! The _furore_
+you would excite there, the glory in which you would swim (or sink!)
+would be of an ineffable resonance and effulgence; but I fear it would
+simply be a _fatal_ Apotheosis, a prostrating exaltation. The devil of
+the thing (for yourself) would be that that terrific country is in every
+pulse of its being and on every inch of its surface a roaring
+repudiation and negation of anything like Privacy, and of the blinding
+and deafening Publicity you might come near to perish. _But_ we will jaw
+about it--there is so much to say--and for Hester it would be another
+matter: _she_ could ride the whirlwind and enjoy, in a manner, the
+storm. Besides, _she_ isn't the Princess Royal--but only _a remove_ of
+the Blood! Again, however, _nous en causerons_--on Thursday. I shall so
+hug the chance.... I am impatient for it and am yours and the Child's
+all so faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. William James._
+
+/#
+ The offering to Henry James from his friends in England on his
+ seventieth birthday (April 15, 1913) took the form of a letter, a
+ piece of plate (described in the following), and a request that he
+ would sit for his portrait.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+April 1st, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Alice,
+*/
+
+Today comes blessedly your letter of the 18th, written after the receipt
+of my cable to you in answer to your preceding one of the 6th (after you
+had heard from Robert Allerton of my illness.) You will have been
+reassured further--I mean beyond my cable--by a letter I lately
+despatched to Bill and Alice conjointly, in which I told them of my good
+and continued improvement. I am going on very well, increasingly so--in
+spite of my having to reckon with so much chronic pectoral pain, now so
+seated and settled, of the queer "falsely anginal" but none the less,
+when it is bad, distressing order.... Moreover too it is astonishing
+with how much pain one can with long practice learn constantly and not
+too defeatedly to live. Therefore, dearest Alice, don't think of this as
+too black a picture of my situation: it is so much brighter a one than I
+have thought at certain bad moments and seasons of the past that I
+should probably ever be able to paint. The mere power to work in such
+measure as I can is an infinite help to a better consciousness--and
+though so impaired compared to what it used to be, it tends to grow,
+distinctly--which by itself proves that I have some firm ground under my
+feet. And I repeat to satiety that my conditions _here_ are admirably
+helpful and favouring.
+
+You can see, can't you? how strange and desperate it would be to "chuck"
+everything up, Lamb House, servants, Miss Bosanquet, _this_ newly
+acquired and prized resource, to come over, by a formidable and
+expensive journey, to spend a summer in the (at best) to me torrid and
+(the inmost inside of 95 apart) utterly arid and vacuous Cambridge.
+Dearest Alice, I could come back to America (could be carried back on a
+stretcher) to die--but never, never to live. To say how the question
+affects me is dreadfully difficult because of its appearing so to make
+light of you and the children--but when I think of how little Boston and
+Cambridge were of old ever _my_ affair, or anything but an accident, for
+me, of the parental life there to which I occasionally and painfully and
+losingly sacrificed, I have a superstitious terror of seeing them at the
+end of time again stretch out strange inevitable tentacles to draw me
+back and destroy me. And then I could never either make or afford the
+journey (I have no margin at all for _that_ degree of effort.) But you
+will have understood too well--without my saying more--how little I can
+dream of any deplacement now--especially for the sake of a milieu in
+which you and Peg and Bill and Alice and Aleck would be burdened with
+the charge of making up _all_ my life.... You see my capital--yielding
+all my income, intellectual, social, associational, on the old
+investment of so many years--my capital is _here_, and to let it all
+slide would be simply to become bankrupt. Oh if you only, on the other
+hand, you and Peg and Aleck, _could_ walk beside my bath-chair down this
+brave Thames-side I would get back into it again (it was some three
+weeks ago dismissed,) and half live there for the sake of your company.
+I have a kind of sense that you would be able to live rather pleasantly
+near me here--if you could once get planted. But of course I on my side
+understand all your present complications.
+
+_April 16th!_ It's really too dismal, dearest Alice, that, breaking off
+the above at the hour I _had_ to, I have been unable to go on with it
+for so many days. It's now more than a fortnight old; still, though my
+check was owing to my having of a sudden, just as I rested my pen, to
+drop perversely into a less decent phase (than I reported to you at the
+moment of writing) and [from which I] have had with some difficulty to
+wriggle up again, I am now none the less able to send you no too bad
+news. I have wriggled up a good deal, and still keep believing in my
+capacity to wriggle up in general.... Suffice if for the moment that I
+just couldn't, for the time, drive the pen myself--when I am "bad" I
+feel too demoralised, too debilitated, for this; and it doesn't at all
+do for me then to push against the grain. Don't feel, all the same, that
+if I resort this morning to the present help, it is because I am _not_
+feeling differently--for I really am in an easier way again (I mean of
+course specifically and "anginally" speaking) and the circumstances of
+the hour a good deal explain my proceeding thus. I had yesterday a
+Birthday, an extraordinary, prodigious, portentous, quite public
+Birthday, of all things in the world, and it has piled up
+acknowledgments and supposedly delightful complications and arrears at
+such a rate all round me that in short, Miss Bosanquet being here, I
+today at least throw myself upon her aid for getting on
+correspondentially--instead of attending to my proper work, which has,
+however, kept going none so badly in spite of my last poor fortnight. I
+will tell you in a moment of my signal honours, but want to mention
+first that your good note written on receipt of A Small Boy has
+meanwhile come to me and by the perfect fulness of its appreciation gave
+me the greatest joy. There are several things I want to say to you
+about the shape and substance of the book--and I will yet; only now I
+want to get this off absolutely by today's American post, and tell you
+about the Honours, a little, before you wonder, in comparative darkness,
+over whatever there may have been in the American papers that you will
+perhaps have seen; though in two or three of the New York ones more
+possibly than in the Boston. I send you by this post a copy of
+yesterday's Times and one of the Pall Mall Gazette--the two or three
+passages in which, together, I suppose to have been more probably than
+not reproduced in N. Y. But I send you above all a copy of the really
+very beautiful Letter ... ushering in the quite wonderful array of
+signatures (as I can't but feel) of my testifying and "presenting"
+friends: a list of which you perhaps can't quite measure the very
+charming and distinguished and "brilliant" character without knowing
+your London better. What I wish I _could_ send you is the huge harvest
+of exquisite, of splendid sheaves of flowers that converted a goodly
+table in this room, by the time yesterday was waning, into such a
+blooming garden of complimentary colour as I never dreamed I should, on
+my own modest premises, almost bewilderedly stare at, sniff at, all but
+quite "cry" at. I think I must and shall in fact compass sending you a
+photograph of the still more glittering tribute dropped upon me--a
+really splendid "golden bowl," of the highest interest and most perfect
+taste, which would, in the extremity of its elegance, be too proudly
+false a note amid my small belongings here if it didn't happen to fit,
+or to sit, rather, with perfect grace and comfort, on the middle of my
+chimney-piece, where the rather good glass and some other happy
+accidents of tone most fortunately consort with it. It is a very brave
+and artistic (exact) reproduction of a piece of old Charles II plate;
+the bowl or cup having handles and a particularly charming lid or
+cover, and standing on an ample round tray or salver; the whole being
+wrought in solid silver-gilt and covered over with quaint incised little
+figures of a (in the taste of the time) Chinese intention. In short it's
+a very beautiful and honourable thing indeed.... Against the _giving to
+me_ of the Portrait, presumably by Sargent, if I do succeed in being
+able to sit for it, I have absolutely and successfully protested. The
+possession, the attribution or ownership of it, I have insisted, shall
+be only their matter, that of the subscribing friends. I am sending
+Harry a copy of the Letter too--but do send him on this as well. You see
+there _must_ be good life in me still when I can gabble so hard. The
+Book appears to be really most handsomely received hereabouts. It is
+being treated in fact with the very highest consideration. I hope it is
+viewed a little in some such mannerly light roundabout yourselves, but I
+really call for no "notices" whatever. I don't in the least want 'em.
+What I _do_ want is to personally and firmly and intimately encircle Peg
+and Aleck and their Mother and squeeze them as hard together as is
+compatible with squeezing them so tenderly! With this _tide_ of gabble
+you will surely feel that I shall soon be at you again. And so I shall!
+Yours, dearest Alice, and dearest all, ever so and ever so!
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Percy Lubbock._
+
+/#
+ A copy of H. J.'s letter of thanks was sent to each of the
+ subscribers to the birthday present. He eventually preferred that
+ their names should be given in a postscript to his letter, which
+ follows in its final form.
+#/
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+April 21st, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear blest Percy!
+*/
+
+I enclose you herewith a sort of provisional apology for a Form of
+Thanks! Read it and tell me on Wednesday, when I count on you at 1.45,
+whether you think it will do--as being on the one hand not too pompous
+or important and on the other not too free and easy. I have tried to
+steer a middle way between hysterical emotion and marble immortality! To
+any emendation you suggest I will give the eagerest ear, though I have
+really considered and pondered my expression not a little, studying the
+pro's and con's as to each _tour_. However, we will earnestly speak of
+it. The question of exactly where and how my addresses had best figure
+when the thing is reduced to print you will perhaps have your idea
+about. For it must seem to you, as it certainly does to me, that their
+names must in common decency be all drawn out again.... But you will
+pronounce when we meet--heaven speed the hour!
+
+Yours, my dear Percy, more than ever constantly,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+P.S. It seems to me that the little arrangement that really almost
+_imposes_ itself would be that the Printed Thing should begin with my
+date and address and my Dear Friends All; and that the full list,
+taking even three complete pages or whatever, should then and there draw
+itself out; after which, as a fresh paragraph, the body of my little
+text should begin. Anything else affects me as _more_ awkward; and I
+seem to see you in full agreement with me as to the absolute necessity
+that every Signer, without exception, shall be addressed.
+
+
+
+
+_To two hundred and seventy Friends._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+
+April 21st, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Friends All,
+*/
+
+Let me acknowledge with boundless pleasure the singularly generous and
+beautiful letter, signed by your great and dazzling array and reinforced
+by a correspondingly bright material gage, which reached me on my recent
+birthday, April 15th. It has moved me as brave gifts and benedictions
+can only do when they come as signal surprises. I seem to wake up to an
+air of breathing good will the full sweetness of which I had never yet
+tasted; though I ask myself now, as a second thought, how the large
+kindness and hospitality in which I have so long and so consciously
+lived among you could fail to act itself out according to its genial
+nature and by some inspired application. The perfect grace with which it
+has embraced the just-past occasion for its happy thought affects me, I
+ask you to believe, with an emotion too deep for stammering words. I was
+drawn to London long years ago as by the sense, felt from still earlier,
+of all the interest and association I should find here, and I now see
+how my faith was to sink deeper foundations than I could presume ever to
+measure--how my justification was both stoutly to grow and wisely to
+wait. It is so wonderful indeed to me as I count up your numerous and
+various, your dear and distinguished friendly names, taking in all they
+recall and represent, that I permit myself to feel at once highly
+successful and extremely proud. I had never in the least understood that
+I was the one or signified that I was the other, but you have made a
+great difference. You tell me together, making one rich tone of your
+many voices, almost the whole story of my social experience, which I
+have reached the right point for living over again, with all manner of
+old times and places renewed, old wonderments and pleasures reappeased
+and recaptured--so that there is scarce one of your ranged company but
+makes good the particular connection, quickens the excellent relation,
+lights some happy train and flushes with some individual colour. I pay
+you my very best respects while I receive from your two hundred and
+fifty pair of hands, and more, the admirable, the inestimable bowl, and
+while I engage to sit, with every accommodation to the so markedly
+indicated "one of you," my illustrious friend Sargent. With every
+accommodation, I say, but with this one condition that you yourselves,
+in your strength and goodness, remain guardians of the result of his
+labour--even as I remain all faithfully and gratefully yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+P.S. And let me say over your names.
+
+[There follows the list of the two hundred and seventy subscribers to
+the birthday gift.]
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. G. W. Prothero._
+
+/#
+ Mr. and Mrs. Prothero, already at Rye, had suggested that H. J.
+ should go to Lamb House for Whitsuntide.
+#/
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+
+April 30th, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+Best of Friends Both!
+*/
+
+Oh it is a dream of delight, but I should have to climb a perpendicular
+mountain first. Your accents are all but irresistible, and your company
+divinely desirable, but if you knew how thoroughly, and for such
+innumerable good reasons, I am seated here till I am able to leave for a
+real and workable absence, you would do my poor plea of impossibility
+justice. I have just conversed with Joan and Kidd, conversed so affably,
+not to say lovingly, in the luminous kitchen, which somehow let in a
+derisive glare upon every cranny and crevice of the infatuated scheme.
+With this fierce light there mingled the respectful jeers of the two
+ladies themselves, which rose to a mocking (though still deeply
+deferential) climax for the picture of their polishing off, or dragging
+violently out of bed, the so dormant and tucked-in house in the ideal
+couple of hours. Before their attitude I lowered my lance--easily
+understanding moreover that their round of London gaieties is still so
+fresh and spiced a cup to them that to feel it removed from their lips
+even for a moment is almost more than they can bear. And then the coarse
+and brutal truth is, further that I am oh so utterly well fixed here for
+the moment and so void of physical agility for any kind of somersault. A
+little while back, while the Birthday raged, I did just look about me
+for an off-corner; but now there has been a drop and, the best calm of
+Whitsuntide descending on the scene here, I feel it would be a kind of
+lapse of logic to hurry off to where the social wave, hurrying ahead of
+me, would be breaking on a holiday strand. I _am_ so abjectly, so
+ignobly fond of not "travelling." To keep up not doing it is in itself
+for me the most thrilling of adventures. And I am working so well
+(unberufen!) with my admirable Secretary; I shouldn't really dare to ask
+her to join our little caravan, raising it to the number of five, for a
+fresh tuning-up again. And on the other hand I mayn't now abandon what I
+am fatuously pleased to call my work for a single precious hour. Forgive
+my beastly rudeness. I will write more in a day or two. Do loll in the
+garden yourselves to your very fill; do cultivate George's geniality; do
+steal any volume or set of volumes out of the house that you may like;
+and do still think gently of your poor ponderous and thereby, don't you
+see? so permanent, old friend,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To William James, junior._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+
+June 18th, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Bill,
+*/
+
+I suppose myself to be trying to-day to get off a brief response both to
+Harry and to dear Peg (whom I owe, much rather, volumes of
+acknowledgment to;) but I put in first these few words to you and
+Alice--for the quite wrong reason that the couple of notes just received
+from you are those that have last come. This is because I feel as if I
+had worried you a good bit more than helped over the so interesting
+name-question of the Babe. It wasn't so much an attempted solution, at
+all, that I the other week hastily rushed into, but only a word or two
+that I felt I absolutely had to utter, for my own relief, by way of
+warning against our reembarking, any of us, on a fresh and possibly
+interminable career of the tiresome and graceless "Junior." You see I
+myself suffered from that tag to help out my identity for forty years,
+greatly disliking it all the while, and with my dislike never in the
+least understood or my state pitied; and I felt I couldn't be dumb if
+there was any danger of your Boy's being started unguardedly and _de
+gaiete de coeur_ on a like long course; so probably and desirably
+_very_ very long in his case, given your youth and "prominence," in
+short your immortal duration. It seemed to me I ought to do _something_
+to conjure away the danger, though I couldn't go into the matter of
+exactly _what_, at all, as if we were only, and most delightfully,
+talking it over at our leisure and face to face--face to face with the
+Babe, I mean; as I wish to goodness we were! The different modes of
+evasion or attenuation, in that American world where designations are so
+bare and variations, of the accruing or "social" kind, so few, are
+difficult to go into this distance; and in short all that I meant at all
+by my attack was just a Hint! I feel so for poor dear Harry's carrying
+of _his_ tag--and as if I myself were directly responsible for it!
+However, no more of that.
+
+To this machinery the complications arising from the socially so fierce
+London June inevitably (and in fact mercifully) drive me; for I feel the
+assault, the attack on one's time and one's strength, even in my so
+simplified and disqualified state; which it is my one great effort not
+to allow to be knocked about. However, I of course do succeed in
+simplifying and in guarding myself enormously; one can't but succeed
+when the question is so vital as it has now become with me. Which is
+really but a preface to telling you how much the most interesting thing
+in the matter has been, during the last three weeks, my regular sittings
+for my portrait to Sargent; which have numbered now some seven or eight,
+I forget which, and with but a couple more to come. So the thing is, I
+make out, very nearly finished, and the head apparently (as I much hope)
+to have almost nothing more done to it. It is, I infer, a very great
+success; a number of the competent and intelligent have seen it, and so
+pronounce it in the strongest terms.... In short it seems likely to be
+one of S.'s very fine things. One is almost full-face, with one's left
+arm over the corner of one's chair-back and the hand brought round so
+that the thumb is caught in the arm-hole of one's waistcoat, and said
+hand therefore, with the fingers a bit folded, entirely visible and
+"treated." Of course I'm sitting a little askance in the chair. The
+canvas comes down to just where my watch-chain (such as it is, poor
+thing!) is hung across the waistcoat: which latter, in itself, is found
+to be splendidly (poor thing though it also be) and most interestingly
+treated. Sargent _can_ make such things so interesting--such things as
+my coat-lappet and shoulder and sleeve too! But what is most
+interesting, every one is agreed, is the mouth--than which even he has
+never painted a more living and, as I am told, "expressive"! In fact I
+can quite see that myself; and really, I seem to feel, the thing will be
+all that can at the best (the best with such a subject!) have been
+expected of it. I only wish you and Alice had assisted at some of the
+sittings--as Sargent likes animated, sympathetic, beautiful, talkative
+friends to do, in order to correct by their presence too lugubrious
+expressions. I take for granted I shall before long have a photograph to
+send you, and then you will be able partially to judge for yourselves.
+
+I grieve over your somewhat sorry account of your own winter record of
+work, though I allow in it for your habitual extravagance of blackness.
+Evidently the real meaning of it is that you are getting so _fort_ all
+the while that you kick every rung of your ladder away from under you,
+by mere uncontrollable force, as you mount and mount. But the rungs, I
+trust, are all the while being carefully picked up, far below, and
+treasured; this being Alice's, to say nothing of anybody else's, natural
+care and duty. Give all my love to her and to the beautiful nursing
+scrap! I want to say thirty things more to her, but my saying power is
+too finite a quantity. I gather that this will find you happily, and I
+trust very conveniently and workably, settled at Chocorua--where may the
+summer be blest to you, and the thermometer low, and the motor-runs
+many! Now I really have to get at Harry! But do send this in any case on
+to Irving Street, for the sake of the report of the picture. I want them
+to have the good news of it without delay.
+
+/*
+Yours both all affectionately,
+
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Rhoda Broughton._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+June 25th, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Rhoda,
+*/
+
+I reply to your quite acclaimed letter--if there can be an acclamation
+of _one_!--by this mechanic aid for the simple reason that, much
+handicapped as to the free brandish of arm and hand nowadays, I find
+that the letters thus helped out do get written, whereas those I am too
+shy or too fearsome or too ceremonious to think anything but my poor
+scratch of a pen good enough for simply don't come into existence at
+all. It greatly touches me at any rate to get news of you by your own
+undiscouraged hand; and it kind of cheers me up about you generally,
+during your exile from this blest town (which you see _I_ continue to
+bless), that you appear to be in some degree "on the go," and capable of
+the brave exploit of a country visit. With a Brother to offer you a
+garden-riot of roses, however, I don't wonder, but the more rejoice,
+that you were inspired and have been sustained.
+
+Yes, thank you, dear F. Prothero was veracious about the Portrait, as
+she is about everything: it is now finished, _paracheve_ (I sat for the
+last time a couple of days ago;) and is nothing less evidently, than a
+very fine thing indeed, Sargent at his very best and poor H. J. not at
+his worst; in short a living breathing likeness and a masterpiece of
+painting. I am really quite ashamed to admire it so much and so
+loudly--it's so much as if I were calling attention to my own fine
+points. I don't, alas, exhibit a "point" in it, but am all large and
+luscious rotundity--by which you may see how true a thing it is. And I
+am sorry to have ceased to sit, in spite of the repeated big holes it
+made in my precious mornings: J. S. S. being so genial and delightful a
+_nature de grand maitre_ to have to do with, and his beautiful high cool
+studio, opening upon a balcony that overhangs a charming Chelsea green
+garden, adding a charm to everything. He liked always a friend or two to
+be in to break the spell of a settled gloom in my countenance by their
+prattle; though you will doubtless think this effect but little achieved
+when I tell you that, having myself found the thing, as it grew, more
+and more like Sir Joshua's Dr. Johnson, and said so, a perceptive
+friend reinforced me a couple of sittings later by breaking out
+irrepressibly with the same judgment....
+
+I am sticking on in London, you see, and have got distinctly better with
+the lapse of the weeks. In fact dear old Town, taken on the absolutely
+simplified and restricted terms in which I insist on taking it (as
+compared with all the ancient storm and stress), is distinctly good for
+me, and the weather keeping cool--absit omen!--I am not in a hurry to
+flee. I shall go to Rye, none the less, within a fortnight. I have just
+heard with distress that dear Norris has come and gone without making me
+a sign (I learn by telephone from his club that he left yesterday.) This
+has of course been "consideration," but damn _such_ consideration. My
+imagination, soaring over the interval, hangs fondly about the time,
+next autumn, when you will be, D.V., restored to Cadogan Gardens. I am
+impatient for my return hither before I have so much as really prepared
+to go. May the months meanwhile lie light on you! Yours, my dear Rhoda,
+all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Alfred Sutro._
+
+/#
+ H. J. had been with Mrs. Sutro to a performance of Henry
+ Bernstein's play, _Le Secret_, with Mme. Simone in the principal
+ part.
+#/
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+June 25th, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Mrs. Sutro,
+*/
+
+Yes, what a sad history of struggles against fate the recital of our
+whole failure to achieve yesterday in Tite Street does make! It was a
+sorry business my not having been able to wire you on Saturday, but it
+wasn't till the Sunday sitting that the change to the Tuesday from the
+probable Wednesday (through the latter's having become impossible,
+unexpectedly, to Sargent) was settled. And yesterday was the last, the
+real last time--it terminated even at 12.30. Any touch more would be
+simply detrimental, and the hand, to my sense, is now all admirably
+there. But you must see it some day when you are naturally in town--I
+can easily arrange for that. I shall be there, I seem to make out, for a
+considerable number of days yet: Mrs. Wharton comes over from Paris on
+the 30th for a week, however, and, I apprehend, will catch me up in
+_her_ relentless Car (pardon any apparent invidious comparison!) for
+most of the time she is here. That at least is her present programme,
+but _souvent femme varie_, and that lady not least. I am addressing you,
+you see, after this mechanic fashion, without apology, for the excellent
+reason that during these forenoon hours it is my so much the most
+_expeditif_ way....
+
+Almost more than missing the seance (to which, by the way, Hedworth
+Williamson came in just at the last with Mrs. Hunter) do I miss talking
+with you of Le Secret last night and of the wondrous demoniac little
+Simone; though of the play, and of Bernstein's extraordinary theatric
+art themselves more than anything else. I think our friend the Critic
+said beautifully right things about them in yesterday's Times--but it
+would be so interesting to have the matter out in more of its aspects
+too.... What most remains with one, in brief, is that the play somehow
+represents a Case merely, as distinguished, so to speak, from a
+Situation; the Case being always a thing rather void of connections with
+and into life at large, and the Situation, dramatically speaking, being
+largely of interest just by _having_ those. Thereby it is that Le
+Secret leaves one nothing to apply, by reflection, and by way of
+illustration, to one's sense of life in general, but is just a barren
+little instance, little limited monstrosity, as curious and vivid as you
+like, but with no moral or morality, good old word, at all involved in
+it, or projected out of it as an interest. Hence the so _unfertilised_
+state in which the mutual relations are left! Thereby it's only
+theatrically, as distinguished from dramatically, interesting, I think;
+even if it be after that fashion more so, more just theatrically
+valuable, than anything else of Bernstein's. For _him_ it may count as
+almost superior! And beautifully done, all round, yes--save in the
+matter of the fat blonde whose after all pretty recent lapse one has to
+take so comfortably and sympathetically for granted. However, if she had
+been more sylph-like and more pleasing she wouldn't seem to have been
+paying for her past at the rate demanded; and if she had been any way
+different, in short, would have appeared to know, and to have previously
+known, too much what she was about to be pathetic enough, victim enough.
+What a pull the French do get for their drama-form, their straight swift
+course, by being able to postulate such ladies, for interest, sympathy,
+edification even, with such a fine absence of what we call explaining!
+But this is all now: I must post it on the jump. Do try to put in a few
+hours in town at some time or other before I go; and believe me yours
+all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Hugh Walpole._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye,
+Aug: 21: 13.
+*/
+
+...Beautiful must be your Cornish land and your Cornish sea, idyllic
+your Cornish setting, like this flattering, this wonderful summer, and
+ours here doubtless may claim but a modest place beside it all. Yet as
+you have with you your Mother and Sister, which I am delighted to hear
+and whom I gratefully bless, so I can match them with my nephew and
+niece (the former with me alas indeed but for these 10 or 12 days,) who
+are an extreme benediction to me. My niece, a charming and interesting
+young person and _most_ conversable, stays, I hope, through the greater
+part of September, and I even curse that necessary limit--when she
+returns to America.... I like exceedingly to hear that your work has got
+so bravely on, and envy you that sovereign consciousness. When it's
+finished--well, when it's finished let some of those sweet young people,
+the _bons amis_ (yours), come to me for the small change of remark that
+I gathered from you the other day (you were adorable about it) they have
+more than once chinked in your ear as from my poor old pocket, and they
+will see, _you_ will, in what coin I shall have paid them. I too am
+working with a certain shrunken regularity--when not made to lapse and
+stumble by circumstances (damnably physical) beyond my control. These
+circumstances tend to come, on the whole (thanks to a great power of
+patience in my ancient organism,) rather _more_ within my management
+than for a good while back; but to live with a bad and chronic anginal
+demon preying on one's vitals takes a great deal of doing. However, I
+didn't mean to write you of that side of the picture (save that it's a
+large part of that same,) and only glance that way to make sure of your
+tenderness even when I may seem to you backward and blank. It isn't to
+exploit your compassion--it's only to be able to feel that I am not
+without your fond understanding: so far as your blooming youth
+(_there's_ the crack in the fiddle-case!) _can_ fondly understand my so
+otherwise-conditioned age.... My desire is to stay on here as late into
+the autumn as may consort with my condition--I dream of sticking on
+through November even if possible: Cheyne Walk and the black-barged
+yellow river will be the more agreeable to me when I get back to them. I
+make out that you will then be in London again--I mean _by_ November,
+though such a black gulf of time intervenes; and then of course I may
+look to you to come down to me for a couple of days. It will be the
+lowest kind of "jinks"--so halting is my pace; yet we shall somehow make
+it serve. Don't say to me, by the way, a propos of jinks--the "high"
+kind that you speak of having so wallowed in previous to leaving
+town--that I ever challenge you as to _why_ you wallow, or splash or
+plunge, or dizzily and sublimely soar (into the jinks element,) or
+whatever you may call it: as if I ever remarked on anything but the
+absolute inevitability of it for you at your age and with your natural
+curiosities, as it were, and passions. It's good healthy exercise, when
+it comes but in bouts and brief convulsions, and it's always a kind of
+thing that it's good, and considerably final, to _have_ done. We must
+know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours and mine, what we
+are talking about--and the only way to know is to have lived and loved
+and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't
+regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth--I only regret, in my
+chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace. Bad
+doctrine to impart to a young idiot or duffer, but in place for a young
+friend (pressed to my heart) with a fund of nobler passion, the
+preserving, the defying, the dedicating, and which always has the last
+word; the young friend who can dip and shake off and go his straight way
+again when it's time. But we'll talk of all this--it's absolutely late.
+Who is D. H. Lawrence, who, you think, would interest me? Send him and
+his book along--by which I simply mean Inoculate me, at your convenience
+(don't address me the volume), so far as I can _be_ inoculated. I always
+_try_ to let anything of the kind "take." Last year, you remember, a
+couple of improbabilities (as to "taking") did worm a little into the
+fortress. (Gilbert Cannan was one.) I have been reading over Tolstoi's
+interminable _Peace and War_, and am struck with the fact that I now
+protest as much as I admire. He doesn't _do_ to read over, and that
+exactly is the answer to those who idiotically proclaim the impunity of
+such formless shape, such flopping looseness and such a denial of
+composition, selection and style. He has a mighty fund of life, but the
+_waste_, and the ugliness and vice of waste, the vice of a not finer
+_doing_, are sickening. For me he makes "composition" throne, by
+contrast, in effulgent lustre!
+
+/*
+Ever your fondest of the fond,
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Archibald Grove._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+August 22nd, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Kate Grove,
+*/
+
+Please don't measure by my not-to-be-avoided delay (of three or four--or
+five, days) to acknowledge it, the degree of pleasure and blest relief
+your most kind letter represents for me. I have fallen these last years
+on evil days, physically speaking, and have to do things only when and
+as I rather difficultly _can_, and not after a prompter fashion. But you
+give me a blest _occasion_, and I heartily thank you for it. Ever since
+that so pleasant meeting of ours in Piccadilly toward the end of
+1909--nearly four long years ago--have I been haunted with the dreadful
+sense of a debt to your benevolence that has remained woefully
+undischarged. I came back to this place that same day--of our happy
+encounter--to be taken on the morrow with the preliminaries of a
+wretched illness that dismally developed, that lasted _actively_, in
+short, for two long years, and that has left me for the rest of my
+ancient days much compromised and disqualified (though I should be
+better of some of it all now--I mean _betterer_!--if I weren't so much
+older--or olderer!) However, the point is that just as I had begun, on
+that now far-off occasion, to take the measure of what was darkly before
+me--that is had been clapped into bed by my Doctor here and a nurse
+clapped down beside me (the first of a perfect procession)--I heard from
+you in very kind terms, asking me to come and see you and Archibald in
+the country--probably at the Pollards inscribed upon your present
+letter. Well, I couldn't so much as make you a _sign_--my correspondence
+had so utterly gone to pieces on the spot. Little by little in the
+aftertime I picked up _some_ of those pieces--others are forever
+scattered to the winds--and this particular piece you see I am picking
+up now, with a slight painful contortion, only after this lapse of the
+years! It is too strange and too graceless--or would be so if _you_
+hadn't just put into it a grace for which, as I say, I can scarce
+sufficiently thank you. The worst of such disasters and derelictions is
+that they take such terrific retrospective explanations and that one's
+courage collapses at all there is to tell, and so the wretched
+appearance continues. However, I repeat, you have transformed it by
+your generous condonation--you have helped me to tell you a small scrap
+of my story. It was on your part a most beautiful inspiration, and I
+bless my ponderous volume for its communication to you of the impulse.
+Quite apart from this balm to my stricken conscience, I do rejoice that
+the fatuous book has beguiled and interested you. I had pleasure in
+writing it, but I delight in the liberality of your appreciation. But I
+wish you had told me too something more of yourself and of Grove, more I
+mean than that you are thus ideally amiable--which I already knew. Your
+"we" has a comprehensive looseness, and I should have welcomed more dots
+on the i's. Almost your only detail is that you were _here_ at some
+comparatively recent hour (I infer,) and that you only gave my little
+house a beautiful dumb glare and went your way again. Why do you do such
+things?--they give you almost an air of exulting in them afterwards! If
+I only had a magic "car" of my own I would jump into it tomorrow and
+come over to see you at Crowborough--I _was_ there in that fashion, by
+an afternoon lift from a friend, exactly a year ago. My brother
+William's only daughter, a delightful young woman, and her eldest
+brother, a most able and eminent young man, are with me at this time,
+though _he_ too briefly, and demand of me, or receive from me, all the
+attention my reduced energies are capable of in a social (so to speak)
+and adventurous way, but if anything is possible later on I will do my
+best toward it. I wish you were both conceivable at luncheon _here_. Do
+ask yourselves candidly if you aren't--and make me the affirmative sign.
+I should so like to see you. I recall myself affectionately to
+Archibald--I think of the ancient wonders, images, scenes--all
+fantasmagoric now. Yours and his all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To William Roughead, W. S._
+
+/#
+ Mr. Roughead, at this time a stranger, had sent H. J. some
+ literature of a kind in which he always took a keen interest--the
+ literature of crime. The following refers to the gift of a
+ publication of the Juridical Society of Edinburgh, dealing with
+ trials of witches in the time of James I. Other volumes of the same
+ nature followed, and the correspondence led to a valued friendship
+ with the giver.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+August 24th, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Mr. Roughead,
+*/
+
+I succumbed to your Witchery, that is I read your brave pages, the very
+day they swam into my ken--what a pleasure, by the way, to hang over a
+periodical page so materially handsome as that of which the Scots
+members of your great profession "dispose"!--those at least who are
+worthy. But face to face with my correspondence, and with my age (a
+"certain," a very certain, age,) and some of its drawbacks, I am aware
+of the shrunken nature of my poor old shrunken energies of response in
+general (once fairly considerable;) and hence in short this little
+delay. Of a horrible interest and a most ingenious vividness of
+presentation is all that hideous business in your hands--with the
+unspeakable King's figure looming through the caldron-smoke he kicks up
+to more abominable effect than the worst witch images into which he so
+fondly seeks to convert other people. He was truly a precious case and
+quite the sort of one that makes us most ask how the time and place
+concerned with him could at all stagger under him or successfully
+stomach him. But the whole, the collective, state of mind and tissue of
+horrors somehow fall outside of our measure and sense and exceed our
+comprehension. The amenability of the victims, the wonder of what their
+types and characters would at all "rhyme with" among ourselves today,
+takes more setting forth than it can easily get--even as you figure it
+or touch on it; and there are too many things (_in_ the amenability) as
+to which one vainly asks one's self what they can too miserably have
+_meant_. That is the flaw in respect to interest--that the "psychology"
+of the matter fails for want of more intimate light in the given, in
+_any_ instance. It doesn't seem enough to say that the wretched people
+were amenable just to torture, or their torturers just to a hideous
+sincerity of fear; for the selectability of the former must have rested
+on some aspects or qualities that elude us, and the question of what
+could pass for the latter as valid appearances, as verifications of the
+imputed thing, is too abysmal. And the psychology of the loathsome James
+(oh the Fortunes of Nigel, which Andrew Lang admired!) is of no use in
+mere glimpses of his "cruelty," which explains nothing, or unless we get
+it _all_ and really enter the horrid sphere. However, I don't want to do
+that in truth, for the wretched aspects of the creature do a disservice
+somehow to the so interesting and on the whole so sympathetic appearance
+of his wondrous mother. That she should have had but one issue of her
+body and that he should have had to be that particular mixture of all
+the contemptibilities, "bar none," is too odious to swallow. Of course
+he had a horrid papa--but he has always been retroactively compromising,
+and my poor point is simply that he is the more so the more one looks at
+him (as your rich page makes one do). But I insist too much, and all I
+really wanted to say is: "Do, very generously, send me the sequel to
+your present study--my appetite has opened to it too; but then go back
+to the dear old human and sociable murders and adulteries and forgeries
+in which we are so agreeably at home. And don't tell me, for charity's
+sake, that your supply runs short!" I am greatly obliged to you for that
+good information as to the accessibility of those modern cases--of which
+I am on the point of availing myself. It's a kind of relief to me to
+gather that the sinister Arran--I may take such visions too hard, but it
+has been _made_ sinister to me--hasn't quite answered for you. Here we
+have been having a wondrous benignant August--may you therefore have had
+_some_ benignity. And may you not feel the least bit pressingly the pull
+of this letter.
+
+/*
+Yours most truly,
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+P. S. Only send me the next Juridical--and _then_ a wee word.
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. William James._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+August 28th, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Alice,
+*/
+
+Your Irving St. letter of the 16th has blessedly come, and Harry alas,
+not so auspiciously, leaves me tomorrow on his way to sail from
+Southampton on Saturday. But though it's very, _very_ late in the
+evening (I won't tell you how late,) I want this hurried word to go
+along with him, to express both my joy of hearing from you and my joy of
+_him_, little as that is expressible. For how can I tell you what it is
+for me in all this latter time that William's children, and your
+children, should be such an interest, such a support and such a
+benediction? Peggy and Harry, between them, will have crowned this
+summer with ease and comfort to me, and I know how it will be something
+of the same to you that they have done so.... It makes me think all the
+while, as it must forever (you will feel, I well know) make _you_, of
+what William's joy of him would have been--something so bitter rises at
+every turn from everything that is good for us and that _he_ is out of.
+I have shared nothing happy with the children these weeks (and there
+have been, thank heaven, many such things) without finding that
+particular shadow always of a sudden leap out of its lair. But why do I
+speak to you of this as if I needed to and it weren't with you all the
+while far more than it can be even with me? The only thing is that to
+feel it and say it, unspeakable though one's tenderness be, is a sort of
+dim propitiation of his ghost that hovers yearningly for us--doesn't
+it?--at once so partakingly near and yet so far off in darkness!
+However, I throw myself into the imagination that he may blessedly pity
+_us_ far more than we can ever pity him; and the great thing is that
+even our sense of _him_ as sacrificed only keeps him the more intensely
+with us.... Good-night, dearest Alice.
+
+/*
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Howard Sturgis._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+Sept: 2nd, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dearest of all Howards,
+*/
+
+I long so for news of you that nothing but this act of aggression will
+serve, and that even though I know (none better!) what a heavy, not to
+say intolerable overburdening of illness is the request that those even
+too afflicted to feed themselves shall feed the post with vivid accounts
+of themselves. But though I don't in the least imagine that you are not
+feeding yourself (I hope very regularly and daintily,) this is all the
+same an irresistible surrender to sentiments of which you are the loved
+object--downright crude affection, fond interest, uncontrollable
+yearning. Look you, it isn't a _request_ for anything, even though I
+languish in the vague--it's just a renewed "declaration"--of
+dispositions long, I trust familiar to you and which my uncertainty
+itself makes me want, for my relief, to reiterate. A vagueish (which
+looks like _agueish_, but let the connection particularly forbid!) echo
+of you came to me shortly since from Rhoda Broughton--more or less to
+the effect that she believed you to be still in Scotland and still
+nurse-ridden (which is _my_ rude way of putting it;) and this she took
+for not altogether significant of your complete recovery of ease.
+However, she is on occasion a rich dark pessimist--which is always the
+more picturesque complexion; and she may that day but have added a more
+artful touch to her cheek. I decline to believe that you are not rising
+by gentle stages to a fine equilibrium unless some monstrous evidence
+crowds upon me. I have myself little by little left such a weight of
+misery behind me--really quite shaken off, though ever so slowly, the
+worst of it, that slowness is to me no unfavouring argument at all, nor
+is the fact of fluctuations a thing to dismay. One goes unutterably
+roundabout, but still one goes--and so it is I have _come_. To where I
+_am_, I mean; which is doubtless where I shall more or less stay. I can
+_do_ with it, for want of anything grander--and it's comparative peace
+and ease. It isn't what I wish _you_--for I wish and invoke upon you the
+superlative of these benedictions, and indeed it would give me a good
+shove on to the positive myself to know that _your_ comparative creeps
+quietly forward. Don't _resent_ creeping--there's an inward joy in it at
+its best that leaping and bounding don't know. And I'm sure you are
+having it--even if you still _only_ creep--at its best. I live
+snail-like here, and it's from my modest brown shell that I reach, oh
+dearest Howard, ever so tenderly forth to you. I am having--absit
+omen!--a very decent little summer. My quite admirable niece Peggy has
+been with me for some weeks; she is to be so some three more, and her
+presence is most soothing and supporting. (I can't stand stiff solitude
+in the large black doses I once could.) ...
+
+But good-night and take all my blessing--all but a scrap for William.
+Yours, dearest Howard, so very fondly,
+
+/*
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. G. W. Prothero._
+
+/#
+ The "young man from Texas" was Mr. Stark Young, who had appealed to
+ Mrs. Prothero for guidance in the study of H. J.'s books. H. J. was
+ amused by the request, of which Mrs. Prothero told him, and
+ immediately wrote the following.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Rye.
+Sept 14th, 1913.
+*/
+
+This, please, for the delightful young man from Texas, who shews such
+excellent dispositions. I only want to meet him half way, and I hope
+very much he won't think I don't when I tell him that the following
+indications as to five of my productions (splendid number--I glory in
+the tribute of his appetite!) are all on the basis of the Scribner's (or
+Macmillan's) collective and revised and prefaced edition of my things,
+and that if he is not minded somehow to obtain access to _that_ form of
+them, ignoring any others, he forfeits half, or much more than half, my
+confidence. So I thus amicably beseech him--! I suggest to give him as
+alternatives these two slightly different lists:
+
+/*
+1. Roderick Hudson.
+2. The Portrait of a Lady.
+3. The Princess Casamassima.
+4. The Wings of the Dove.
+5. The Golden Bowl.
+*/
+
+/*
+1. The American.
+2. The Tragic Muse.
+3. The Wings of the Dove.
+4. The Ambassadors.
+5. The Golden Bowl.
+*/
+
+The second list is, as it were, the more "advanced." And when it comes
+to the shorter Tales the question is more difficult (for characteristic
+selection) and demands separate treatment. Come to me about that, dear
+young man from Texas, later on--you shall have your little tarts when
+you have eaten your beef and potatoes. Meanwhile receive this from your
+admirable friend Mrs. Prothero.
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To H. G. Wells._
+
+/#
+ The following refers to Mr. Wells's novel, _The Passionate
+ Friends_.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+
+September 21st, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Wells,
+*/
+
+I won't take time to tell you how touched I freshly am by the constancy
+with which you send me these wonderful books of yours--I am too
+impatient to let you know _how_ wonderful I find the last. I bare my
+head before the immense ability of it--before the high intensity with
+which your talent keeps itself interesting and which has made me absorb
+the so full-bodied thing in deep and prolonged gustatory draughts. I am
+of my nature and by the effect of my own "preoccupations" a critical, a
+_non-naif_, a questioning, worrying reader--and more than ever so at
+this end of time, when I jib altogether and utterly at the "fiction of
+the day" and find no company but yours and that, in a degree, of one or
+two others possible. To read a novel at all I perform afresh, to my
+sense, the act of writing it, that is of re-handling the subject
+according to my own lights and over-scoring the author's form and
+pressure with my own vision and understanding of _the_ way--this, of
+course I mean, when I see a subject in what he has done and feel its
+appeal to me as one: which I fear I very often don't. This produces
+reflections and reserves--it's the very measure of my attention and my
+interest; but there's nobody who makes these particular reactions less
+_matter_ for me than you do, as they occur--who makes the whole
+apple-cart so run away that I don't care if I _don't_ upset it and only
+want to stand out of its path and see it go. This is because you have so
+positive a process and method of your own (rare and _almost_ sole
+performer to this tune roundabout us--in fact absolutely sole by the
+_force_ of your exhibition) that there's an anxious joy in seeing what
+it does for you and with you. I find you perverse and I find you, on a
+whole side, unconscious, as I can only call it, but my point is that
+_with_ this heart-breaking leak even sometimes so nearly playing the
+devil with the boat your talent remains so savoury and what you do so
+substantial. I adore a rounded objectivity, a completely and patiently
+achieved one, and what I mean by your perversity and your leak is that
+your attachment to the autobiographic form for the _kind of thing_
+undertaken, the whole expression of actuality, "up to date," affects me
+as sacrificing what I hold most dear, a precious effect of
+_perspective_, indispensable, by my fond measure, to beauty and
+authenticity. Where there needn't so much be question of that, as in
+your hero's rich and roaring impressionism, his expression of his own
+experience, intensity and avidity as a whole, you are magnificent, there
+your ability prodigiously triumphs and I grovel before you. This is the
+way to take your book, I think--with Stratton's _own_ picture (I mean of
+himself and _his_ immediate world felt and seen with such exasperated
+and oh such simplified impatiences) as its subject exclusively. So taken
+it's admirably sustained, and the life and force and wit and humour, the
+imagination and arrogance and genius with which you keep it up, are
+tremendous and all your own. I think this projection of Stratton's rage
+of reflections and observations and world-visions is in its vividness
+and humour and general bigness of attack, a most masterly thing to have
+done. His South Africa etc. I think really sublime, and I can do
+beautifully with _him_ and his 'ideas' altogether--he is, and they are,
+an immense success. Where I find myself doubting is where I gather that
+you yourself see your subject more particularly--and where I rather feel
+it escape me. That is, to put it simply--for I didn't mean to draw this
+out so much, and it's 2 o'clock a.m.!--the hero's prodigiously clever,
+foreshortened, impressionising _report_ of the heroine and the relation
+(which last is, I take it, for you, the subject) doesn't affect me as
+the real vessel of truth about them; in short, with all the beauty you
+have put into it--and much of it, especially at the last, is admirably
+beautiful--I don't care a fig for the hero's report _as an account of
+the matter_. You didn't mean a sentimental 'love story' I take it--you
+meant ever so much more--and your way strikes me as _not_ the way to
+give the truth about the woman of our hour. I don't think you _get_
+her, or at any rate give her, and all through one hears your
+remarkable--your wonderful!--reporting manner and voice (up to last
+week, up to last night,) and not, by my persuasion, hers. In those
+letters she writes at the last it's for me all Stratton, all masculinity
+and intellectual superiority (of the most real,) all a more dazzling
+journalistic talent than I observe any woman anywhere (with all respect
+to the cleverness they exhibit) putting on record. It isn't in these
+terms of immediate--that is of her pretended _own_ immediate irony and
+own comprehensive consciousness, that I see the woman made real at all;
+and by so much it is that I should be moved to take, as I say, such
+liberties of reconstruction. But I don't in the least want to take them,
+as I still more emphatically say--for what you _have_ done has held me
+deliciously intent and made me feel anew with thanks to the great Author
+of all things what an invaluable form and inestimable art it is! Go on,
+go on and do it as you like, so long as you _keep_ doing it; your
+faculty is of the highest price, your temper and your hand form one of
+the choicest treasures of the time; my effusive remarks are but the sign
+of my helpless subjection and impotent envy, and I am yours, my dear
+Wells, all gratefully and faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Logan Pearsall Smith._
+
+/#
+ Mr. Pearsall Smith had sent H. J. the _Poems of Digby Mackworth
+ Dolben_, the young writer whose rare promise was cut short by his
+ accidental death in 1867. His poems were edited in 1918, with a
+ biographical introduction, by Mr. Robert Bridges, a friend and
+ contemporary of Dolben at Eton.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+October 27th, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Logan,
+*/
+
+I thank you very kindly for the other bounties which have followed the
+bounty of your visit--beginning with your vivid and charming letter, a
+chronicle of such happy homeward adventure. I greatly enjoyed our so
+long delayed opportunity for free discourse, and hold that any less
+freedom would have done it no due honour at all. I like to think on the
+contrary that we have planted the very standard of freedom, very firmly,
+in my little oak parlour, and that it will hang with but comparative
+heaviness till you come back at some favouring hour and help me to give
+its folds again to the air. The munificence of your two little books I
+greatly appreciate, and have promptly appropriated the very interesting
+contents of Bridges' volume. (The small accompanying guide gives me more
+or less the key to _his_ proper possessive.) The disclosure and picture
+of the wondrous young Dolben have made the liveliest impression on me,
+and I find his personal report of him very beautifully and tenderly, in
+fact just perfectly, done. Immensely must one envy him the possession of
+such a memory--recovered and re-stated, sharply rescued from the tooth
+of time, after so many piled-up years. Extraordinarily interesting I
+think the young genius himself, by virtue of his rare special gift, and
+even though the particular preoccupations out of which it flowers,
+their whole note and aspect, have in them for me something positively
+antipathetic. Uncannily, I mean, does the so precocious and direct
+avidity for all the paraphernalia of a complicated ecclesiasticism
+affect me--as if he couldn't possibly have come to it, or, as we say,
+gone for it, by experience, at that age--so that there is in it a kind
+of implication of the insincere and the merely imitational, the cheaply
+"romantic." However, he was clearly born with that spoon in his mouth,
+even if he might have spewed it out afterwards--as one wonders immensely
+whether he wouldn't. In fact that's the interest of him--that it's the
+privilege of such a rare young case to make one infinitely wonder how it
+might or mightn't have been for him--and Bridges seems to me right in
+claiming that no _equally_ young case has ever given us ground for so
+_much_ wonder (in the personal and aesthetic connection.) Would his
+"ritualism" have yielded to more life and longer days and his quite
+prodigious, but so closely associated, gift have yielded _with_ that (as
+though indissolubly mixed with it)? Or would a big development of
+inspiration and form have come? Impossible to say of course--and
+evidently he could have been but most fine and distinguished whatever
+should have happened. Moreover it is just as we have him, and as Bridges
+has so scrupulously given him, that he so touches and charms the
+imagination--and how instinctive poetic mastery was of the essence, was
+the most rooted of all things, in him, a faculty or mechanism almost
+abnormal, seems to me shown by the thinness of his letters compared with
+the thickness and maturity of his verse. But how can one talk, and how
+can he be anything but wrapped, for our delightful uncertainty, in the
+silver mists of morning?--which one mustn't so much as want to breathe
+upon too hard, much less clear away. They are an immense felicity to
+him and leave him a most particular little figure in the great English
+roll. I sometimes go to Windsor, and the very next one I shall
+peregrinate over to Eton on the chance of a sight of his portrait.
+
+/*
+Yours all faithfully,
+
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To C. Hagberg Wright._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+Oct. 31st, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+Very dear Hagberg--(Don't be alarmed--it's only _me_!)
+*/
+
+I have for a long time had it at heart to write to you--as to which I
+hear you comment: Why the hell then didn't you? Well, because my poor
+old _initiative_ (it isn't anything indecent, though it looks so) has
+become in these days, through physical conditions, extremely impaired
+and inapt--and when once, some weeks ago, I had let a certain very right
+and proper moment pass, the very burden I should have to lift in the
+effort to attenuate that delinquency seemed more formidable every time I
+looked at it. This burden, or rather, to begin with, this delinquency,
+lay in the fact of my neither having signed the appeal about the Russian
+prisoners which you had sent me for the purpose with so noble and
+touching a confidence, nor had the decency to write you a word of
+attenuation or explanation. I _should_, I feel now, have signed it, for
+_you_ and without question and simply because you asked it--against my
+own private judgment in fact; for that's exactly the sort of thing I
+should like to do for you--publicly and consciously make a fool of
+myself: _as_ (even though I grovel before you _generally_ speaking) I
+feel that signing would have amounted to my doing. I felt that at the
+time--but also wanted just to oblige you--if oblige you it might! "Then
+why the hell didn't you?" I hear you again ask. Well, again, very dear
+Hagberg, because I was troubled and unwell--very, and uncertain--very,
+and doomed for the time to drift, to bend, quite helplessly; letting the
+occasion get so out of hand for me that I seemed unable to recover it or
+get back to it. The more shame to me, I allow, since it wasn't a
+question then of my initiative, but just of the responsive and the
+accommodating: at any rate the question worried me and I weakly
+temporised, meaning at the same time independently to write to you--and
+then my disgrace had so accumulated that there was more to say about it
+than I could tackle: which constituted the deterrent _burden_ above
+alluded to. You will do justice to the impeccable chain of my logic, and
+when I get back to town, as I now very soon shall (by the 15th--about--I
+hope,) you will perhaps do even _me_ justice--far from impeccable though
+I personally am. I mean when we can talk again, at our ease, in that
+dear old gorgeous gallery--a pleasure that I shall at once seek to bring
+about. One reason, further, of my graceless failure to try and tell you
+why (why I was distraught about signing,) was that when I _did_ write I
+wanted awfully to be able to propose to you, all hopefully, to come down
+to me here for a couple of days (perhaps you admirably would have done
+so;) but was in fact so inapt, in my then condition, for any decent or
+graceful discharge of the office of host--thanks, as I say, to my
+beastly physical consciousness--that it took all the heart out of me. I
+am comparatively better now--but straining toward Carlyle Mansions and
+Pall Mall. It was above all when I read your so interesting notice of
+Tolstoy's Letters in the Times that I wanted to make you a sign--but
+even that initiative failed. Please understand that nothing will induce
+me to allow you to make the least acknowledgment of this. I shall be
+horrified, mind you, if you take for me a grain of your so drained and
+despoiled letter-energy. Keep whatever mercy I may look to you for till
+we meet. I don't despair of melting you a little toward your
+faithfullest
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Robert Bridges._
+
+/#
+ This continues the subject dealt with in the letter to Mr. Logan
+ Pearsall Smith of Oct. 27, 1913.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+Nov. 7, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Bridges,
+*/
+
+How delightful to hear from you in this generously appreciative way!--it
+makes me very grateful to Logan for having reported to you of my
+pleasure in your beautiful disclosure of young Dolben--which seems to me
+such a happy chance for you to have had, in so effective conditions,
+after so many years--I mean as by the production of cards from up your
+sleeve. My impression of your volume was indeed a very lively one--it
+gave me a really acute emotion to thank you for: which is a luxury of
+the spirit quite rare and refreshing at my time of day. Your picture of
+your extraordinary young friend suggests so much beauty, such a fine
+young individual, and yet both suggests it in such a judging and, as one
+feels, truth-keeping a way, that the effect is quite different from that
+of the posthumous tribute to the early-gathered in general--it inspires
+a peculiar confidence and respect. Difficult to do I can well imagine
+the thing to have been--keeping the course between the too great claim
+and the too timid; and this but among other complicated matters. I feel
+however that there is need, in respect to the poor boy's note of
+inspiration, of no shade of timidity at all--of so absolutely
+distinguished a reality is that note, given the age at which it sounded:
+such fineness of impulse and such fineness of art--one doesn't really at
+all know where such another instance lurks--in the like condition. What
+an interesting and beautiful one to have had such a near view of--in the
+golden age, and to have been able to recover and reconstruct with such
+tenderness--of the measured and responsible sort. How could you _not_
+have had the emotion which, as you rightly say, can be such an
+extraordinary (on occasion such a miracle-working) quickener of
+memory!--and yet how could you not also, I see, feel shy of some of the
+divagations in that line to which your subject is somehow formed rather
+to lend itself! Your tone and tact seem to me perfect--and the rare
+little image is embedded in them, so safely and cleanly, for
+duration--which is a real "service, from you, to literature" and to our
+sum of intelligent life. And you make one ask one's self just enough, I
+think, what he would have _meant_ had he lived--without making us do so
+too much. I don't quite see, myself, what he would have meant, and the
+result is an odd kind of concurrence in his charming, flashing
+catastrophe which is different from what most such accidents, in the
+case of the young of high promise, make one feel. However, I do envy you
+the young experience of your own, and the abiding sense of him in his
+actuality, just as you had and have them, and your having been able to
+intervene with such a light and final authority of taste and tenderness.
+I say final because the little clear medallion will hang there exactly
+as you have framed it, and your volume is the very condition of its
+hanging. There should be _absolutely_ no issue of the poems without your
+introduction. This is odd or anomalous considering what the best of them
+are, bless them!--but it is exactly the best of them that most want it.
+I hear the poor young spirit call on you out of the vague to stick to
+him. But you always will.--I find myself so glad to be writing to you,
+however, that I only now become aware that the small hours of the a.m.
+are getting larger ...
+
+/*
+Yours all faithfully,
+
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Andre Raffalovich._
+
+/#
+ This refers to the gift of the _Last Letters of Aubrey Beardsley_,
+ edited by Father Gray (1904).
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+November 7th, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Andre Raffalovich,
+*/
+
+I thank you again for your letter, and I thank you very kindly indeed
+for the volume of Beardsley's letters, by which I have been greatly
+touched. I knew him a little, and he was himself to my vision touching,
+and extremely individual; but I hated his productions and thought them
+extraordinarily base--and couldn't find (perhaps didn't try enough to
+find!) the formula that reconciled this baseness, aesthetically, with
+his being so perfect a case of the artistic spirit. But now the personal
+spirit in him, the beauty of nature, is disclosed to me by your letter
+as wonderful and, in the conditions and circumstances, deeply pathetic
+and interesting. The amenity, the intelligence, the patience and grace
+and play of mind and of temper--how charming and individual an
+exhibition!...And very right have you been to publish the letters, for
+which Father Gray's claim is indeed supported. The poor boy remains
+quite one of the few distinguished images on the roll of young English
+genius brutally clipped, a victim of victims, given the vivacity of his
+endowment. I am glad I have three or four very definite--though one of
+them rather disconcerting--recollections of him.
+
+Very curious and interesting your little history of your migration to
+Edinburgh--on the social aspect and intimate identity of which you must,
+I imagine, have much gathered light to throw ... And you are still young
+enough to find La Province meets your case too. It is because I am now
+so very far from that condition that London again (to which I return on
+the 20th) has become possible to me for longer periods: I am so old that
+I have shamelessly to simplify, and the simplified London that in the
+hustled and distracted years I vainly invoked, has come round to me
+easily now, and fortunately meets my case. I shall be glad to see you
+there, but I _won't_--thank you, no!--come to meat with you at
+Claridge's. One doesn't go to Claridge's if one simplifies. I am obliged
+now absolutely _never_ to dine or lunch out (a bad physical ailment
+wholly imposes this:) but I hope you will come to luncheon with _me_,
+since you have free range--on very different vittles from the Claridge,
+however, if you can stand that. I count on your having still more then
+to tell me, and am yours most truly,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Henry James, junior_
+
+/#
+ In quoting some early letters of William James's in _Notes of a Son
+ and Brother_, H.J. had not thought it necessary to reproduce them
+ with absolutely literal fidelity. The following interesting account
+ of his procedure was written in answer to some queries from his
+ nephew on the subject.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+November 15th-18th, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Harry,
+*/
+
+...It is very difficult, and even pretty painful, to try to put forward
+after the fact the considerations and emotions that have been intense
+for one in the long ferment of an artistic process: but I must
+nevertheless do something toward making you see a little perhaps how ...
+the editing of those earliest things other than "rigidly" had for me a
+sort of exquisite inevitability. From the moment of those of my weeks in
+Cambridge of 1911 during which I began, by a sudden turn of talk with
+your Mother, to dally with the idea of a "Family Book," this idea took
+on for me a particular light, the light which hasn't varied, through all
+sorts of discomfitures and difficulties--and disillusionments, and in
+which in fact I have put the thing through. That turn of talk was the
+germ, it dropped the seed. Once when I had been "reminiscing" over some
+matters of your Dad's and my old life of the time previous, far
+previous, to her knowing us, over some memories of our Father and Mother
+and the rest of us, I had moved her to exclaim with the most generous
+appreciation and response, "Oh Henry, why don't you _write_ these
+things?"--with such an effect that after a bit I found myself wondering
+vaguely whether I _mightn't_ do something of the sort. But it dated from
+those words of your Mother's, which gave me the impulse and determined
+the spirit of my vision--a spirit and a vision as far removed as
+possible from my mere isolated documentation of your Father's record. We
+talked again, and still again, of the "Family Book," and by the time I
+came away I felt I had somehow found my inspiration, though the idea
+could only be most experimental, and all at the mercy of my putting it,
+perhaps defeatedly, to the proof. It was such a very special and
+delicate and discriminated thing to do, and only governable by
+proprieties and considerations all of its own, as I should evidently, in
+the struggle with it, more and more find. This is what I did find above
+all in coming at last to work these Cambridge letters into the whole
+harmony of my text--the general purpose of which was to be a reflection
+of all the amenity and felicity of our young life of that time at the
+highest pitch that was consistent with perfect truth--to show us all at
+our best for characteristic expression and colour and variety and
+everything that would be charming. And when I laid hands upon the
+letters to use as so many touches and tones in the picture, I frankly
+confess I seemed to see them in a better, or at all events in another
+light, here and there, than those rough and rather illiterate copies I
+had from you showed at their face value. I found myself again in such
+close relation with your Father, such a revival of relation as I hadn't
+known since his death, and which was a passion of tenderness for doing
+the best thing by him that the material allowed, and which I seemed to
+feel him in the room and at my elbow asking me for as I worked and as he
+listened. It was as if he had said to me on seeing me lay my hands on
+the weak little relics of our common youth, "Oh but you're not going to
+give me away, to hand me over, in my raggedness and my poor accidents,
+quite unhelped, unfriendly: you're going to do the very best for me you
+_can_, aren't you, and since you appear to be making such claims for me
+you're going to let me seem to justify them as much as I possibly may?"
+And it was as if I kept spiritually replying to this that he might
+indeed trust me to handle him with the last tact and devotion--that is
+do with him everything I seemed to feel him _like_, for being kept up to
+the amenity pitch. These were small things, the very smallest, they
+appeared to me all along to be, tiny amendments in order of words,
+degrees of emphasis &c., to the end that he should be more easily and
+engagingly readable and thereby more tasted and liked--from the moment
+there was no excess of these _soins_ and no violence done to his real
+identity. Everything the letters meant affected me so, in all the
+business, as of _our_ old world only, mine and his alone together, with
+every item of it intimately known and remembered by me, that I daresay I
+did instinctively regard it at last as all _my_ truth, to do what I
+would with.... I have to the last point the instinct and the sense for
+fusions and interrelations, for framing and encircling (as I think I
+have already called it) every part of my stuff in every other--and that
+makes a danger when the frame and circle play over too much upon the
+image. Never again shall I stray from my proper work--the one in which
+that danger is the reverse of one and becomes a rightness and a
+beauty....
+
+I may mention however that your exception that particularly caught my
+eye--to "poor old Abraham" for "poor old Abe"--was a case for change
+that I remember feeling wholly irresistible. Never, never, under our
+Father's roof did we talk of Abe, either _tout court_ or as "Abe
+Lincoln"--it wasn't conceivable: Abraham Lincoln he was for us, when he
+wasn't either Lincoln or Mr. Lincoln (the Western note and the
+popularization of "Abe" were quite away from us _then_:) and the form of
+the name in your Dad's letter made me reflect how off, how far off in
+his queer other company than ours I must at the time have felt him to
+be. You will say that this was just a reason for leaving it so--and so
+in a sense it was. But I could _hear_ him say Abraham and couldn't hear
+him say Abe, and the former came back to me as sincere, also graver and
+tenderer and more like ourselves, among whom I couldn't imagine any
+"Abe" ejaculation under the shock of his death as possible.... However,
+I am not pretending to pick up any particular challenge to my appearance
+of wantonness--I should be able to justify myself (_when_ able) only out
+of such abysses of association, and the stirring up of these, for
+vindication, is simply a strain that stirs up tears.
+
+/*
+Yours, dearest Harry, all affectionately,
+
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edmund Gosse._
+
+/#
+ The portrait of H. J. (together with the bust by Mr. Derwent Wood)
+ had been on exhibition to the subscribers in Mr. Sargent's studio
+ in Tite Street. The "slight flaw in the title" had been the
+ accidental omission of the subscribers' names in the printed
+ announcement sent to them, whereby the letter opened familiarly
+ with "Dear"--without further formality. It was partly to repair the
+ oversight that H. J. had "put himself on exhibition" each day
+ beside the portrait.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+December 18th, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Gosse,
+*/
+
+The exquisite incident in Tite Street having happily closed, I have
+breathing time to thank you for the goodly Flaubert volume, which safely
+arrived yesterday and which helps me happily out of my difficulty. You
+shall receive it again as soon as I have made my respectful use of it.
+
+The exhibition of the Portrait came to a most brilliant end to-day, with
+a very great affluence of people. (There have been during the three days
+an immense number.) It has been a great and charming success--I mean the
+View has been; and the work itself acclaimed with an unanimity of
+admiration and, literally, of _intelligence_, that I can intimately
+testify to. For I really put myself on exhibition beside it, each of the
+days, morning and afternoon, and the translation (a perfect Omar
+Khayyam, _quoi!_) visibly left the original nowhere. I _attended_--most
+assiduously; and can really assure you that it has been a most beautiful
+and flawless episode. The slight original flaw (in the title) I sought
+to bury under a mountain of flowers, till I found that it didn't in the
+least do to "explain it away," as every one (like the dear Ranee) said:
+they exclaimed too ruefully "Ah, don't tell me you didn't _mean_ it!"
+After which I let it alone, and speedily recognised that it was really
+_the_ flower--even if but a little wayward wild flower!--of our success.
+I am pectorally much spent with affability and emissions of voice, but
+as soon as the tract heals a little I shall come and ask to be heard in
+your circle. Be meanwhile at great peace and ease, at perfect rest about
+everything.
+
+/*
+Yours all faithfully,
+
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Bruce L. Richmond._
+
+/#
+ The projected article on "The New Novel" afterwards appeared in two
+ numbers of the _Times Literary Supplement_, and was reprinted in
+ _Notes on Novelists_.
+#/
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+December 19th, 1913.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Bruce Richmond,
+*/
+
+Your good letter of a day or two ago is most interesting and suggestive
+and puts to me as lucidly as possible the questions with which the
+appearance of my so copious George Sand is involved. I have been turning
+the matter earnestly over, and rather think I had best tell you now at
+once in what form it presses on myself. This forces me to consider it in
+a particular light. It has come up for me that I shall be well advised
+(from my own obscure point of view!) to collect into a volume and
+publish at an early date a number of ungathered papers that have
+appeared here and there during the last fifteen years; these being
+mainly concerned with the tribe of the Novelists. This involves my
+asking your leave to include in the Book the article on Balzac of a few
+months ago, and my original idea was that if the G.S. should appear in
+the Supplement at once, you would probably authorize my reprinting _it_
+also after a decent little interval. As the case stands, and as I so
+well understand it on your showing--the case for the Supplement I
+mean--I am afraid that I shall really _need_ the G.S. paper for the
+Volume before you will have had time to put it forth at your entire
+convenience--the only thing I would have wished you to consider. What
+should you say to my withdrawing the paper in question from your
+indulgent hands, and--as the possibility glimmers before me--making you
+a compensation in the way of something addressed with greater actuality
+and more of a certain current significance to the Spring Fiction Number
+that you mention? (The words, you know, if you can forgive my
+irreverence--I divine in fact that you share it!--somehow suggest
+competition with a vast case of plate-glass "window-dressing" at
+Selfridge's!) The G.S. isn't really a very fit or near thing for the
+purpose of such a number: that lady is as a fictionist too superannuated
+and rococo at the present time to have much bearing on any of those
+questions pure and simple. My article really deals with her on quite a
+different side--as you would see on coming to look into it. Should you
+kindly surrender it to me again I would restore to it four or five pages
+that I excised in sending it to you--so monstrously had it rounded
+itself!--and make it thereby a still properer thing for my Book, where
+it would add itself to two other earlier studies of the same subject, as
+the Balzac of the Supplement will likewise do. And if you ask me what
+you then gain by your charming generosity I just make bold to say that
+there looms to me (though I have just called it glimmering) the
+conception of a paper really _related_ to our own present ground and
+air--which shall gather in several of the better of the younger
+generation about us, some half dozen of whom I think I can make out as
+treatable, and try to do under _their_ suggestion something that may be
+of real reference to our conditions, and of some interest about them or
+help for them.... Do you mind my going so far as to say even, as a
+battered old practitioner, that I have sometimes yearningly wished I
+might intervene a little on the subject of the Supplement's Notices of
+Novels--in which, frankly, I seem to have seen, often, so many occasions
+missed! Of course the trouble is that all the books in question, or
+most of them at least, are such wretchedly poor occasions in themselves.
+If it hadn't been for this I think I should have two or three times
+quite said to you: "Won't you let _me_ have a try?" But when it came to
+considering I couldn't alas, probably, either have read the books or
+pretended to give time and thought to them. It is in truth only because
+I half persuade myself that there are, as I say, some half a dozen
+_selectable_ cases that the possibility hovers before me. Will you
+consider at your leisure the plea thus put? I shouldn't want my paper
+back absolutely at once, though in the event of your kindly gratifying
+me I should like it before very long.
+
+I am really working out a plan of approach to your domicile in the
+conditions most favourable to my seeing you as well as Elena, and it
+will in due course break upon you, if it doesn't rather take the form of
+my trying to drag you both hither!
+
+/*
+Believe me all faithfully yours,
+
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Hugh Walpole._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+Jan. 2, 1914.
+*/
+
+...I have just despatched your inclosure to P. L. at _I, Dorotheergasse
+6, Vienna_; an address that I recommend your taking a note of; and I
+have also made the reflection that the fury, or whatever, that Edinburgh
+inspires you with ought, you know, to do the very opposite of drying up
+the founts of your genius in writing to me--since you say your letter
+would have been other (as it truly might have been longer) didn't you
+suffer so from all that surrounds you. That's the very _most_ juvenile
+logic possible--and the juvenility of it (which yet in a manner touches
+me) is why I call you retrogressive--by way of a long stroke of
+endearment. _There_ was exactly an admirable matter for you to write me
+_about_--a matter as to which you are strongly and abundantly feeling;
+and in a relation which lives on communication as ours surely should,
+and would (save for starving,) such occasions fertilise. However, of
+course the terms are easy on which you extract communication from me,
+and always have been, and always will be--so that there's doubtless a
+point of view from which your reservations (another fine word) are quite
+right. I'm glad at any rate that you've been reading Balzac (whose
+"romantic" side _is_ rot!) and a great contemporary of your own even in
+his unconsidered trifles. _I've_ just been reading Compton Mackenzie's
+_Sinister Street_ and finding in it an unexpected amount of talent and
+life. Really a very interesting and remarkable performance, I think, in
+spite of a considerable, or large, element of waste and
+irresponsibility--_selection_ isn't in him--and at one and the same time
+so extremely young (he too) and so confoundingly mature. It has the
+feature of improving so as it goes on, and disposes me much to read, if
+I can, its immediate predecessor. You must tell me again what you know
+of him (I've forgotten what you _did_ tell me, more or less,) but in
+your own good time. I think--I mean I blindly feel--I should be _with_
+you about Auld Reekie--which somehow hasn't a right to be so handsome.
+But I long for illustrations--at your own good time. We have emerged
+from a very clear and quiet Xmas--quiet for _me_, save for rather a
+large assault of correspondence. It weighs on me still, so this is what
+I call--and you will too--very brief.... I wish you the very decentest
+New Year that ever was. Yours, dearest boy, all affectionately,
+
+/*
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Compton Mackenzie._
+
+
+/#
+ It will be recalled that Edward Compton, Mr. Mackenzie's father,
+ had played the part of Christopher Newman in H.J.'s play _The
+ American_, produced in 1891.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+Jan. 21, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear "Monty Compton!"--
+*/
+
+For that was, I think, as I first heard you named--by a worthy old
+actress of your father's company who, when we were rehearsing The
+American in some touring town to which I had gone for the purpose,
+showed me with touching elation a story-book she had provided for you on
+the occasion of your birthday. That story-book, weighted with my
+blessing on it, evidently sealed your vocation--for the sharpness of my
+sense that you are really a prey to the vocation was what, after reading
+you, I was moved to emphasise to Pinker. I am glad he let you know of
+this, and it gives me great pleasure that you have written to me--the
+only abatement of which is learning from you that you are in such
+prolonged exile on grounds of health. May that dizzying sun of Capri
+cook every peccant humour out of you. As to this untowardness I mean,
+frankly, to inquire of your Mother--whom I am already in communication
+with on the subject of going to see her to talk about you! For that, my
+dear young man, I feel as a need: with the force that I find and so much
+admire in your talent your _genesis_ becomes, like the rest of it,
+interesting and remarkable to me; you are so rare a case of the _kind_
+of reaction from the theatre--and from so _much_ theatre--and the
+reaction in itself is rare--as seldom taking place; and when it does it
+is mostly, I think, away from the arts altogether--it is violent and
+utter. But your pushing straight through the door into literature and
+then closing it so tight behind you and putting the key in your pocket,
+as it were--that strikes me as unusual and brilliant! However, it isn't
+to go into all that that I snatch these too few minutes, but to thank
+you for having so much arrested my attention, as by the effect of
+Carnival and Sinister Street, on what I confess I am for the most part
+(as a consequence of some thankless experiments) none too easily
+beguiled by, a striking exhibition by a member of the generation to
+which you belong. When I wrote to Pinker I had only read S.S., but I
+have now taken down Carnival in persistent short draughts--which is how
+I took S.S. and is how I take anything I take at all; and I have given
+myself still further up to the pleasure, quite to the emotion, of
+intercourse with a young talent that really moves one to hold it to an
+account. Yours strikes me as very living and real and sincere, making me
+care for it--to anxiety--care above all for what shall become of it. You
+ought, you know, to do only some very fine and ripe things, really solid
+and serious and charming ones; but your dangers are almost as many as
+your aspects, and as I am a mere monster of _appreciation_ when I
+read--by which I mean of the critical passion--I would fain lay an
+earnest and communicative hand on you and hypnotize or otherwise bedevil
+you into proceeding as I feel you most _ought_ to, you know. The great
+point is that I would so fain personally see you--that we may talk; and
+I do very much wish that you _had_ given me a chance at one of those
+moments when you tell me you inclined to it, and then held off. You are
+so intelligent, and it's a blessing--whereby I prefigure it as a luxury
+to have a go at you. I am to be in town till the end of June--I
+_hibernate_ no more at Rye; and if you were only to turn up a little
+before that it would be excellent. Otherwise you must indeed come to me
+there. I wish you all profit of all your experience, some of it lately,
+I fear, rather harsh, and all experience of your genius--which I also
+wish myself. I _think_ of Sinister Street II, and am yours most truly,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To William Roughead, W.S._
+
+/#
+ Mr. Roughead had sent H. J. his edition of the trial of Mary
+ Blandy, the notable murderess, who was hung in 1752 for poisoning
+ her father.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+January 29th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Mr. Roughead,
+*/
+
+I devoured the tender Blandy in a single feast; I thank you most kindly
+for having anticipated so handsomely my appetite; and I highly
+appreciate the terms in general, and the concluding ones in particular,
+in which you serve her up. You tell the story with excellent art and
+animation, and it's quite a gem of a story in its way, History herself
+having put it together as with the best compositional method, a strong
+sense for sequences and the proper march, order and _time_. The only
+thing is that, as always, one wants to know _more_, more than the mere
+evidence supplies--and wants it even when as in this case one feels that
+the people concerned were after all of so dire a simplicity, so
+primitive a state of soul and sense, that the exhibition they make tells
+or expresses about all there was of them. Dear Mary must have consisted
+but of two or three pieces, one of which was a strong and simple carnal
+affinity, as it were, with the stinking little Cranstoun. Yet, also, one
+would like to get a glimpse of how an apparently normal young woman of
+her class, at that period, could have viewed such a creature in such a
+light. The light would throw itself on the Taste, the sense of
+proportion, of the time. However, dear Mary was a clear barbarian,
+simply. Enfin!--as one must always wind up these matters by exhaling. I
+continue to have escaped a further sense of ---- and as I think I
+have told you I cultivate the exquisite art of ignorance. Yet not of
+Blandy, Pritchard and Co.--_there_, perversely, I am all for knowledge.
+Do continue to feed in me that languishing need, and believe me all
+faithfully yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+/#
+ The two novels referred to in the following are M. Marcel Proust's
+ _Du Cote de chez Swann_ and M. Abel Bonnard's _La Vie et l'Amour_.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+February 25th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Edith,
+*/
+
+The nearest I have come to receipt or possession of the interesting
+volumes you have so generously in mind is to have had _Bernstein's_
+assurance, when I met him here some time since, that _he_ would give
+himself the delight of sending me the Proust production, which he
+learned from me that I hadn't seen. I tried to dissuade him from this
+excess, but nothing would serve--he was too yearningly bent upon it, and
+we parted with his asseveration that I might absolutely count on this
+tribute both to poor Proust's charms and to my own. But depuis lors--!
+he has evidently been less "en train" than he was so good as to find
+_me_. So that I shall indeed be "very pleased" to receive the "Swann"
+and the "Vie et l'Amour" from you at your entire convenience. It is
+indeed beautiful of you to think of these little deeds of kindness,
+little words of love (or is it the other way round?) What I want above
+all to thank you for, however, is your so brave backing in the matter of
+my disgarnished gums. That I am doing right is already unmistakeable. It
+won't make me "well"; nothing will do that, nor do I complain of the
+muffled miracle; but it will make me mind less being ill--in short it
+will make me better. As I say, it has already done so, even with my
+sacrifice for the present imperfect--for I am "keeping on" no less than
+eight pure pearls, in front seats, till I can deal with them in some
+less exposed and exposing conditions. Meanwhile tons of implanted and
+domesticated gold &c (one's caps and crowns and bridges being _most_
+anathema to Des Voeux, who regards them as so much installed metallic
+poison) have, with everything they fondly clung to, been, less visibly,
+eradicated; and it is enough, as I say, to have made a marked difference
+in my felt state. That is the point, for the time--and I spare you
+further details....
+
+/*
+Yours de coeur,
+
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Dr. J. William White._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+March 2nd, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear J. William,
+*/
+
+I won't pretend it isn't an aid and comfort to me to be able to thank
+you for your so brilliant and interesting overflow from Sumatra in this
+mean way--since from the point of view of such a life as you are
+leading nothing I could possibly do in my poor sphere and state would
+seem less mean than anything else, and I therefore might as well get the
+good of being legible. I am such a votary and victim of the single
+impression and the imperceptible adventure, picked up by accident and
+cherished, as it were, in secret, that your scale of operation and
+sensation would be for me the most choking, the most fatal of
+programmes, and I should simply go ashore at Sumatra and refuse ever to
+fall into line again. But that is simply my contemptible capacity, which
+doesn't want a little of five million things, but only requires [much]
+of three or four; as to which _then_, I confess, my requirements are
+inordinate. But I am so glad, for the world and for themselves, above
+all for you and Letitia, that many great persons, and especially you
+two, are constructed on nobler lines, with stouter organs and longer
+breaths, to say nothing of purses, that I don't in the least mind your
+doing such things if _you_ don't; and most positively and richly enjoy
+sitting under the warm and fragrant spray of the enumeration of them.
+Keep it up therefore, and don't let me hear of your daring to skip a
+single page, or dodge a single prescription, of the programme and the
+dose!...
+
+I am signing, with J. S. S., three hundred very fine photographs of the
+Portrait, ever so much finer still, that he did of me last summer, and
+which I think you know about--in order that they be sent to my friends,
+of whom you are not the least; so that you will find one in Rittenhouse
+Square on your return thither, if with the extraordinarily dissipated
+life you lead you do really get back. With it will wait on you probably
+this, which I hope won't be sent either to meet or to follow you; I
+really can't even to the extent of a letter personally participate in
+your dissipation while it's at its worst. How embarrassed poor Letitia
+must truly be, if she but dared to confess it, at finding herself so
+associated; for that is not _her_ nature; _my_ life here, had she but
+consented to share it, would be so much more congruous with _that_! I
+don't quite gather when you expect to reach these shores--since my brain
+reels at the thought of your re-embarking for them after you reach your
+own at the climax of your orgy. I realise all that these passions are
+capable of leading you on to, and therefore shall not be surprised if
+you do pursue them without a break--shall in fact even be delighted to
+think I may see you gloriously approach by just sitting right here at
+this window, which commands so the prospect. But goodbye, dear good
+friends; gather your roses while ye may and _don't_ neglect this
+blighted modest old bud, your affectionate friend,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Henry Adams._
+
+/#
+ The book sent to Mr. Adams was _Notes of a Son and Brother_, now
+ just published.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+March 21, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Henry,
+*/
+
+I have your melancholy outpouring of the 7th, and I know not how better
+to acknowledge it than by the full recognition of its unmitigated
+blackness. _Of course_ we are lone survivors, of course the past that
+was our lives is at the bottom of an abyss--if the abyss _has_ any
+bottom; of course, too, there's no use talking unless one particularly
+_wants_ to. But the purpose, almost, of my printed divagations was to
+show you that one _can_, strange to say, still want to--or at least can
+behave as if one did. Behold me therefore so behaving--and apparently
+capable of continuing to do so. I still find my consciousness
+interesting--under _cultivation_ of the interest. Cultivate it _with_
+me, dear Henry--that's what I hoped to make you do--to cultivate yours
+for all that it has in common with mine. _Why_ mine yields an interest I
+don't know that I can tell you, but I don't challenge or quarrel with
+it--I encourage it with a ghastly grin. You see I still, in presence of
+life (or of what you deny to be such,) have reactions--as many as
+possible--and the book I sent you is a proof of them. It's, I suppose,
+because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an
+inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions--appearances, memories,
+many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and
+"enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing--and I _do_. I believe I
+shall do yet again--it is still an act of life. But you perform them
+still yourself--and I don't know what keeps me from calling your letter
+a charming one! There we are, and it's a blessing that you understand--I
+admit indeed alone--your all-faithful
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. William James._
+
+/#
+ "Minnie" is of course Mary Temple, the young cousin of old days
+ commemorated in the last chapter of _Notes of a Son and Brother_.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+March 29th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Alice,
+*/
+
+This is a Saturday a.m., but several days have come and gone since there
+came to me your dear and beautiful letter of March 14th (considerably
+about my "Notes,") and though the American post closes early I must get
+off some word of recognition to you, however brief I have scramblingly
+to make it. I hoped of course you would find in the book something of
+what I difficultly tried to put there--and you have indeed, you have
+found all, and I rejoice, because it was in talk with you in that
+terrible winter of 1910-11 that the impulse to the whole attempt came to
+me. Glad you will be to know that the thing appears to be quite
+extraordinarily appreciated, absolutely acclaimed, here--scarcely any
+difficulties being felt as to "parts that are best," unless it be that
+the early passage and the final chapter about dear Minnie seem the
+great, the beautiful "success" of the whole. What I have been able to do
+for _her_ after all the long years--judged by this test of expressed
+admiration--strikes me as a wondrous stroke of fate and beneficence of
+time: I seem really to have (her letters and ---- 's and your
+admirable committal of them to me aiding) made her emerge and live on,
+endowed her with a kind dim sweet immortality that places and keeps
+her--and I couldn't be at all sure that I was doing it; I was so anxious
+and worried as to my really getting the effect in the right way--with
+tact and taste and without overstrain....
+
+I am counting the weeks till Peg swims into view again--so delightful
+will it be to have her near and easily to commune with her, and above
+all to get from her all that detail of the state of the case about you
+all that I so constantly yearn for and that only talk can give. The one
+shade on the picture is my fear that she will find the poor old Uncle
+much more handicapped about _socially_ ministering to them (two young
+women with large social appetites) than she is perhaps prepared to find
+me. And yet after all she probably does take in that I have had to cut
+my connections with society entirely. Complications and efforts with
+people floor me, anginally, _on the spot_, and my state is that of
+living every hour and at every minute on my guard. So I am anything but
+the centre of an attractive circle--I am cut down to the barest
+inevitabilities, and occupied really more than in any other way now in
+simply saving my life. However, the blest child was witness of my
+condition last summer, my letters have probably sufficiently reflected
+it since--and I am really on a _better_ plane than when she was last
+with me. To have her with me is a true support and joy, and I somehow
+feel that with her admirable capacity to be interested in the near and
+the characteristic, whatever these may be, she will have lots of
+pleasant and informing experience and contact in spite of my inability
+to "take her out" or to entertain company for her at home. She knows
+this and she comes in all her indulgence and charity and generosity--for
+the sake of the sweet good she can herself do _me_. And I rejoice that
+she has Margaret P. with her--who will help and solidify and enrich the
+whole scene. No. 3 will be all satisfactorily ready for them, and I have
+no real fear but that they will find it a true bower of ease. The omens
+and auspices seem to me all of the best.
+
+The political atmosphere here is charged to explosion as it has never
+been--what is to happen no man knows; but this only makes it a more
+thrilling and spectacular world. The tension has never been so
+great--but it will, for the time at least, ease down. The dread of
+violence is shared all round. I am finishing this rather tiredly by
+night--I couldn't get it off and have alas missed a post. But all love.
+
+/*
+Your affectionate
+
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Arthur Christopher Benson._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+
+April 21st, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Arthur,
+*/
+
+What a delightful thing this still more interesting _extension_ of our
+fortunate talk! I can't help being glad that you had second thoughts
+(though your first affected me as good enough, quite, to need no better
+ones,) since the result has been your rich and genial letter. The only
+thing is that if your first thoughts were to torment (or whatever)
+yourself, these supersessive rather torment _me_--by their suggestion
+that there's still more to say yet--than you do say: as when you remark
+that you ought either to have told me nothing about ---- or to have
+told me all. "All" is precisely what I should have liked to have from
+you--all in fact about everything!--and what a pity we can't appoint
+another tea-hour for my making up that loss. You clearly live in these
+years so much more in the current of life than I do that no one of your
+impressions would have failed of a lively interest for me--and the more
+we had been able to talk of ---- and his current, and even
+of ---- and his, the more I should have felt your basis of
+friendship in everything and the generosity of your relation to them. I
+don't think we see anything, about our friends, unless we see all--so
+far as in us lies; and there is surely no care we can so take for them
+as to turn our mind upon them liberally. Don't turn yours too much upon
+yourself for having done so. The virtue of that "ruder jostle" that you
+speak of so happily is exactly that it shakes out more aspects and
+involves more impressions, and that in fine you young people are
+together in a way that makes vivid realities spring from it--I having
+cognisance, in my ancient isolation, I well know, but of the more or
+less edited, revised, not to say expurgated, creature. It's
+inevitable--that is--for ancient isolation; but you're in the thick of
+history and the air of it was all about you, and the records of it in
+the precious casket that I saw you give in charge to the porter. So with
+that, oh man of action, perpetually breaking out and bristling with
+performances and seeing (and feeling) things on the field, I don't know
+what you mean by the image of the toys given you to play with in a
+corner--charming as the image is. It's the _corner_ I contest--you're in
+the middle of the market-place, and I alter the figure to that of the
+brilliant juggler acquitting himself to the admiration of the widest
+circle amid a whirl of objects projected so fast that they can scarce be
+recognised, but that as they fly round your head one somehow guesses to
+be _books_, and one of which in fact now and again hits that of your
+gaping and dazzled and all-faithful old spectator and friend,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Humphry Ward._
+
+/#
+ The following is one of a large number of letters written in answer
+ to condolences on the subject of the mutilation of his portrait, at
+ this time hanging at the Royal Academy, by a militant
+ "suffragette": who had apparently selected it for attack as being
+ the most notable and valuable canvas in the exhibition.
+#/
+
+_Dictated_.
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+
+May 6th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear and Illustrious Friend,
+*/
+
+I blush to acknowledge by this rude method the kindness that has
+expressed itself on your part in your admirable heroic hand. But figure
+me as a poor thing additionally impaired by the tomahawk of the savage,
+and then further see me as breasting a wondrous high tide of postal
+condolence in this doubly-damaged state. I am fairly driven to machinery
+for expedition's sake. And let me say at once that I gather the sense of
+the experts to be that my wounds are really curable--such rare secrets
+for restoration can now be brought to bear! They are to be tried at any
+rate upon Sargent's admirable work, and I am taking the view that they
+_must_ be effective. As for our discomfort from _ces dames_, that is
+another affair--and which leaves me much at a loss. Surely indeed the
+good ladies who claim as a virtue for their sex that they can look an
+artistic possession of that quality and rarity well in the face only to
+be moved bloodily to smash it, make a strange appeal to the confidence
+of the country in the _kind_ of character they shall bring to the
+transaction of our affairs. Valuable to us that species of intelligence!
+Precious to us that degree of sensibility! But I have just made these
+reflections in very much these terms in a note to dear Anne Ritchie.
+Postal pressure induces conversational thrift! However, I do indeed hope
+to come to see you on Thursday, either a bit early or a bit late, and
+shall then throw all thrift to the winds and be splendidly extravagant!
+I dare say I shall make bold to bring with me my young niece (my brother
+William's only daughter,) who is spending a couple of months near me
+here; and possibly too a young relative of her own who is with her. Till
+very soon then at the worst.
+
+/*
+Yours all faithfully,
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+
+May 17th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Thomas,
+*/
+
+As usual I groan gratefully under the multiplication of your bounties;
+the last of these in particular heaping that measure up. Pardon the use
+of this form to tell you so: there are times when I faint by the
+wayside, and can then only scramble to my feet by the aid of the firm
+secretarial crutch. I fall, physically, physiologically speaking, into
+holes of no inconsiderable depth, and though experience shows me that I
+can pretty well always count on scrambling out again, my case while at
+the bottom is difficult, and it is from such a depth, as happens, that I
+now address you: not wanting to wait till I _am_ above ground again, for
+my arrears, on those emergences, are too discouraging to face. Lilla
+wrote me gentle words on the receipt of the photograph of Sargent's
+portrait, and now you have poured upon the wounds it was so deplorably
+to receive the oil of your compassion and sympathy. I gather up duly and
+gratefully those rich drops, but even while I stow them away in my best
+reliquary am able to tell you that, quite extraordinarily, the
+consummate restorer has been able to make the injuries good, desperate
+though they at first seemed, and that I am assured (this by Sargent
+himself) that one would never guess what the canvas has been through. It
+goes back at once to the Academy to hang upon its nail again, and as
+soon as it's in place I shall go and sneak a glance at it. I have feared
+equally till now seeing it either wounded or doctored--that is in course
+of treatment. Tell Lilla, please, for her interest, that the job will
+owe its success apparently very much to the newness of the paint, the
+whole surface more plastic to the manipulator's subtle craft than if it
+had hardened with time, after the manner of the celebrated old things
+that are really superior, I think, by their age alone. As I didn't paint
+the picture myself I feel just as free to admire it inordinately as any
+other admirer may be; and those are the terms in which I express myself.
+I won't say, my dear Thomas, much more today. Don't worry about me on
+any of these counts: I am on a distinctly better footing than this time
+a year ago, and have worried through upwards of a twelve-month without
+the convenience, by which I mean the deathly complication, of having to
+see a Doctor. If I can but go on with that separation there will be hope
+for me yet. I take you to be now in villeggiatura and preparing for the
+irruption of your Nursery--which, however, with your vast safe
+countryside to spread it over won't probably press on you to
+smotheration. I remember getting the sense that Hancock would bear much
+peopling. Plant it here and there with my affectionate thought, ground
+fine and scattered freely, and believe me yours both all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+/#
+ The allusions in the following are to a motor-tour of Mrs.
+ Wharton's in Algeria and Tunisia, and to an article by her in the
+ _Times Literary Supplement_ on "The Criticism of Fiction."
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+
+June 2nd, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Edith,
+*/
+
+Yes, I have been even to my own sense too long and too hideously
+silent--small wonder that I should have learned from dear Mary Cadwal
+therefore (here since Saturday night) that I have seemed to you not less
+miserably so. Yet there has been all the while a certain sublime
+inevitability in it--over and above those _general_ reactions in favour
+of a simplifying and softening _mutisme_ that increase with my
+increasing age and infirmity. I am able to go on only always plus
+doucement, and when you are off on different phases of your great
+world-swing the mere side-wind of it from afar, across continents and
+seas, stirs me to wonderments and admirations, sympathies, curiosities,
+intensities of envy, and eke thereby of _humility_, which I have to
+check and guard against for their strain on my damaged organism. The
+_relation_ thus escapes me--and I feel it must so escape you, drunk with
+draughts of every description and immersed in visions which so utterly
+and inevitably turn their back--or turn yours--on what one might one's
+self have de mieux to vous offrir. The idea of tugging at you to make
+you look round therefore--look round at these small sordidries and
+poornesses, and thereby lose the very finest flash of the revelation
+then and there organised for you or (the great thing!) _by_ you
+perchance: that affects me ever as really consonant with no minimum even
+of modesty or discretion on one's own account--so that, in fine, I have
+simply lain stretched, a faithful old veteran slave, upon the door-mat
+of your palace of adventure, sufficiently proud to give the alarm of any
+irruption, should I catch it, but otherwise waiting till you should
+emerge again, stepping over my prostrate form to do so. That gracious
+act now performed by you--since I gather you to be back in Paris by this
+speaking--I get up, as you see, to wish you the most affectionate and
+devoted welcome home and tell you that I believe myself to have "kept"
+in quite a sound and decent way, in the domestic ice-chest of your
+absence. I mix my metaphors a little, comme toujours (or rather comme
+jamais!) but the great thing is to feel you really within hail again and
+in this air of my own poor little world, which isn't for me the
+non-conductor (that's the real hitch when you're "off") of that of your
+great globe-life. I won't try to ask you of this last glory now--for,
+though the temperature of the ice-chest itself has naturally risen with
+your nearer approximation, I still shall keep long enough, I trust, to
+sit at your knee in some peaceful nook here and gather in the wondrous
+tale. I have had echoes--even, in very faint and vague form, that of the
+burglarious attempt upon you in the anonymous oriental city (vagueness
+does possess me!)--but by the time my sound of indignant participation
+would have reached you I took up my Lit. Supp. to find you in such force
+over the subject you there treated, on that so happy occasion, that the
+beautiful firmness and "clarity," even if not charity, of your nerves
+and tone clearly gave the lie to any fear I should entertain for the
+effect of your annoyance. I greatly admired by the same token the fine
+strain of that critical voice from out the path of shade projected upon
+the desert sand, as I suppose, by the silhouette of your camel.
+Beautifully said, thought, felt, inimitably _jete_, the paper has
+excited great attention and admiration here--and is probably doing an
+amount of missionary work in savage breasts that we shall yet have some
+comparatively rude or ingenuous betrayal of. I do notice that the flow
+of the little _impayables_ reviews meanders on--but enfin ne desesperons
+pas.... But oh dear, I want to see you about everything--and am yours
+all affectionately and not in the least patiently,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To William Roughead, W. S._
+
+/#
+ This and the next letter refer to further gifts in the literature
+ of crime. Lord Justice Clerk Macqueen of Braxfield was of course
+ the original of Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+
+June 10th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Roughead,
+*/
+
+(Let me take a flying leap across the formal barrier!) You are the most
+munificent of men as well as the most ingenious of writers, and my
+modest library will have been extremely enriched by you in a department
+in which it has been weak out of all proportion to the yearning
+curiosity of its owner. I greatly appreciate your gift to me of the so
+complete and pictorial Blandy volume--dreadfully informing as it is in
+the whole contemporary connection--the documents are such good reporting
+that they make the manners and the tone, the human and social note, live
+after a fashion beside which our own general exhibition becomes more
+soothing to my soul. Your summary of the Blandy trial strikes me afresh
+as an admirable piece of foreshortening (of the larger quantities--now
+that these are presented.) But how very good the reporting of cases
+appears to have been capable of being all the same, in those
+pre-shorthand days. I find your Braxfield a fine vivid thing--and the
+pleasure of sense over the park-like page of the Juridical is a
+satisfaction by itself; but I confess your hero most interests by the
+fact that he so interested R. L. S., incurable yearning Scot that Louis
+was. I am rather easily sated, in the direct way, with the mainly
+"broad" and monotonously massive characters of that type, uncouth of
+sound, and with their tendency to be almost stupidly sane. History never
+does them--never _has_, I think--_in_adequate justice (you must help her
+to that blandness here;) and it's all right and there they numerously
+and soundly and heavily were and are. But they but renew, ever (when
+reproduced,) my personal appetite--by reaction--for the handlers of the
+fiddle-string and the fumblers for the essence. Such are my more natural
+sneaking affinities. But keep on with them _all_, please--and continue
+to beckon me along the gallery that I can't tread alone and where, by
+your leave, I link my arm confraternally in yours: the gallery of
+sinister perspective just stretches in this manner straight away. I am
+delighted the photograph is to receive such honour--the original (I
+don't mean _me_, but Sargent's improvement on me) is really magnificent,
+and I, unimproved, am yours all truly,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To William Roughead, W. S._
+
+/#
+ Miss Madeleine Hamilton Smith, to whom the following refers, was
+ tried on a charge of poisoning in 1857.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+June 16th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Roughead,
+*/
+
+Your offering is a precious thing and I am touched by it, but I am also
+alarmed for the effect on your fortunes, your future, on those (and
+that) who (and which) may, as it were, depend on you, of these gorgeous
+generosities of munificence. The admirable Report is, as I conceive, a
+high rarity and treasure, and I feel as if in accepting it I were
+snatching the bread perhaps from the lips of unknown generations. Well,
+I gratefully bow my head, but only on condition that it shall revert,
+the important object and alienated heirloom, to the estate of my
+benefactor on my demise. A strange and fortunate thing has
+happened--your packet and letter found me this a.m. in the grip of an
+attack of gout (the first for three or four years, and apparently not
+destined to be very bad, with an admirable remedy that I possess at once
+resorted to.) So I have been reclining at peace for most of the day with
+my foot up and my eyes attached to the prodigious Madeleine. I have read
+your volume straight through, with the extremity of interest and wonder.
+It represents indeed the _type_, perfect case, with nothing to be taken
+from it or added, and with the beauty that she precisely _didn't_
+squalidly suffer, but lived on to admire with the rest of us, for so
+many years, the rare work of art with which she had been the means of
+enriching humanity. With what complacency must she not have regarded it,
+through the long backward vista, during the time (now twenty years ago)
+when I used to hear of her as, married and considered, after a long
+period in Australia, the near neighbour, in Onslow Gardens, of my old
+friends the Lyon Playfairs. They didn't know or see her (beyond the fact
+of her being there,) but they tantalized me, because if it then made me
+very, very old it now piles Ossa upon Pelion for me that I remember
+perfectly her trial during its actuality, and how it used to come to us
+every day in the Times, at Boulogne, where I was then with my parents,
+and how they followed and discussed it in suspense and how I can still
+see the queer look of the "not proven," seen for the first time, on the
+printed page of the newspaper. I stand again with it, on the summer
+afternoon--a boy of 14--in the open window over the Rue Neuve Chaussee
+where I read it. Only I didn't know then of its--the case's--perfect
+beauty and distinction, as you say. A singularly fine thing is this
+report indeed--and a very magnificent the defence. She was truly a
+portentous young person, with the _conditions_ of the whole thing
+throwing it into such extraordinary relief, and yet I wonder all the
+same at the verdict in the face of the so vividly attested, and so fully
+and so horribly, sufferings of her victim. It's astonishing that the
+evidence of what he went through that last night didn't do for her. And
+what a pity she was almost of the pre-photographic age--I would give so
+much for a veracious portrait of her _then_ face. To all of which
+absolutely inevitable acknowledgment you are not to _dream_, please, of
+responding by a single word. I shall take, I foresee, the liveliest
+interest in the literary forger-man. How can we be sufficiently thankful
+for these charming breaks in the sinister perspective? I rest my
+telescope on your shoulder and am yours all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Alfred Sutro._
+
+/#
+ "L'Histoire" is George Sand's _Histoire de ma Vie_, sent by H. J.
+ to Mrs. Sutro in preparation for her proposed visit to Nohant.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+July 28th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Mrs. Sutro,
+*/
+
+I rejoice to hear, by your liberal letter, that the pile of books held
+together and have appeared, on reaching you, to make a decent show. Also
+I'm very glad that it's come in your way to have a look at
+Nohant--though I confess that I ask myself what effect the
+_vulgarization_ of places, "scientifically" speaking, by free and easy
+(and incessant) motor approach may be having on their once comparatively
+sequestered genius. Well, that is exactly what you will tell me after
+you have constate the phenomenon in this almost best of all cases for
+observing it. For Nohant _was_ so shy and remote--and Nohant must be now
+(handed over to the State and the Public as their property) so very much
+to the fore. _Do_ read L'Histoire at any rate first--that is
+indispensable, and the _lecture_ of a facility! Yes, I am liking it very
+much here in these beautiful midsummer coolnesses--though wishing _we_
+weren't so losing our Bloom of mystery by the multitudinous assault.
+However, I hug whatever provincial privacy we may still pretend to at
+this hour of public uproar--so very horrible is the bear-garden of the
+outer world to my sense, under these threatened convulsions. I cravenly
+avert my eyes and stop my ears--scarcely turning round even for a look
+at the Caillaux family. What a family and what a trial--and what a
+suggestion for _us_, of complacent self-comparisons! I clutch at these
+hungrily--in the great deficiency of other sources of any sort of
+assurance for us. May we muddle through even now, though I almost
+wonder if we deserve to! That doubt is why I bury my nose in my
+rose-trees and my inkpot. What a judge of the play you will be becoming,
+with the rate at which Alfred and his typist keep you supplied! Be sure
+to see the little Nohant domestic theatre, by the way--and judge what a
+part _it_ played in that discomfortable house. I long for the autumn
+"run" when you will tell me all your impressions, and am yours all
+faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Sir Claude Phillips._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+July 31st, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Claude,
+*/
+
+I can't not thank you on the spot for your so interesting and moving
+letter, which reflects to me, relievingly in a manner, all the horror
+and dismay in which I sit here alone. I mean that it eases off the
+appalled sense a little to share that sickness with a fellow-victim and
+be able to say a little of what presses on one. What one first feels
+one's self uttering, no doubt, is but the intense unthinkability of
+anything so blank and so infamous in an age that we have been living in
+and taking for our own as if it were of a high refinement of
+civilisation--in spite of all conscious incongruities; finding it after
+all carrying this abomination in its blood, finding this to have been
+what it _meant_ all the while, is like suddenly having to recognise in
+one's family circle or group of best friends a band of murderers,
+swindlers and villains--it's just a similar shock. It makes us wonder
+whom in the world we are now to live with then--and even if with
+everything publicly and internationally so given away we can live, or
+want to live, at all. Very hideous to me is the behaviour of that
+forsworn old pastor of his people, the Austrian Emperor, of whom, so
+eprouve and so venerable, one had supposed better things than so
+interested and so cynical a chucking to the winds of all moral
+responsibility. Infamous seem to me in such a light all the _active_
+great ones of the earth, active for evil, in our time (to speak only of
+that,) from the monstrous Bismarck down! But il s'agit bien to protest
+in face of such a world--one can only possess one's soul in such dignity
+as may be precariously achievable. Almost the worst thing is that the
+dreadfulness, all of it, _may_ become interesting--to the blight and
+ruin of our poor dear old cherished source of interest, and in spite of
+one's resentment at having to live in such a way. With it all too is
+indeed the terrible sense that the people of this country may well--by
+some awful brutal justice--be going to get something bad for the
+exhibition that has gone on so long of their huge materialized stupidity
+and vulgarity. I mean the enormous national sacrifice to insensate
+amusement, without a redeeming idea or a generous passion, that has kept
+making one ask one's self, from so far back, how such grossness and
+folly and blatancy could possibly _not_ be in the long run to be paid
+for. The rate at which we may witness the paying may be prodigious--and
+then no doubt one will pityingly and wretchedly feel that the
+_intention_, after all, was never so bad--only the stupidity
+constitutional and fatal. That is truly the dismal reflection, and on
+which you touch, that if anything very bad does happen to the country,
+there isn't anything like the French intelligence to react--with the
+flannelled fool at the wicket, the muddied oaf and tutti quanti,
+representing so much of our _preferred_ intelligence. However, let me
+pull up with the thought that when I am reduced to--or have come
+to--quoting Kipling for argument, there may be something the matter
+with my conclusion. One can but so distressfully wait and so wonderingly
+watch.
+
+I am sorry to hear that the great London revelry and devilry (even if
+you have had more of the side-wind than of the current itself) has left
+you so consciously spent and sore. You can do with so much _more_ of the
+current, at any rate, than I have ever been able to, that it affects me
+as sad and wrong that that of itself shouldn't be something of a
+guarantee. But if there must be more drawing together perhaps we shall
+blessedly find that we can all more help each other. I quite see your
+point in taking either the grand or the petty tour just now not at all
+for granted, and greatly hope that if you circulate in this country some
+fitful tide will bear you to this quarter--though I confess that when I
+think of the _comparative_ public entertainment on which you would so
+have to throw yourself I blush to beckon you on. I find myself quite
+offensively complacent in the conditions about the established
+simplicity of my own life--I've not "done" anything for so long, and
+have been given over to such spareness and bareness, that I look
+privation in the face as a very familiar friend.
+
+/*
+Yours all faithfully and fearfully,
+
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE WAR
+
+(1914-1916)
+
+
+The letters that follow tell the story of Henry James's life during the
+first year of the war in words that make all others superfluous. The
+tide of emotion on which he was lifted up and carried forward was such
+as he only could describe; and week by week, in scores of letters to
+friends in England and France and America, he uttered himself on behalf
+of those who felt as he did, but who had no language worthy of the time.
+To all who listened to him in those days it must have seemed that he
+gave us what we lacked--a voice; there was a trumpet note in it that was
+heard nowhere else and that alone rose to the height of the truth. For a
+while it was as though the burden of age had slipped from him; he lived
+in the lives of all who were acting and suffering--especially of the
+young, who acted and suffered most. His spiritual vigour bore a strain
+that was the greater by the whole weight of his towering imagination;
+but the time came at last when his bodily endurance failed. He died
+resolutely confident of the victory that was still so far off.
+
+He was at Rye when the war broke out, but he very soon found the peace
+of the country intolerable. He came to London, to be within the current
+of events, and remained there almost uninterruptedly till the end. His
+days were filled with many interests, chief of which was the
+opportunity of talk with wounded soldiers--in hospital, at the houses of
+friends, in the streets as he walked; wherever he met them the sight
+irresistibly drew forth his sympathy and understanding and admiration.
+Close at hand, in Chelsea, there was a centre for the entertainment of
+refugees from Belgium, and for these he was active in charity. Another
+cause in which he was much engaged, and to which he contributed help of
+more kinds than one, was that of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance
+corps in France, organised by the son of his old friend Charles Eliot
+Norton. Every contact with the meaning of war, which no hour could fail
+to bring, gave an almost overpowering surge of impressions, some of
+which passed into a series of essays, written for different charitable
+purposes and now collected in _Within the Rim_ (1919). Even beyond all
+this he was able to give a certain amount of energy to other literary
+work; and indeed he found it essential to cling so far as might be to
+the steadying continuity of creation. The Ivory Tower had to be laid
+aside--it was impossible to believe any longer in a modern fiction,
+supposed to represent the life of the day, which the great catastrophe
+had so belied; but he took up The Sense of the Past again, the fantasmal
+story he had abandoned for its difficulty in 1900--finding its unreality
+now remote enough to be beyond the reach of the war. He also began a
+third volume of reminiscences, The Middle Years. Work of one kind or
+another was pushed forward with increasing effort through the summer of
+1915, the last of his writing being the introduction to the _Letters
+from America_ of Rupert Brooke. He finished this, and spent the eve of
+his last illness, December 1st, in turning over the pages of The Sense
+of the Past, intending to go on with it the next morning.
+
+Meanwhile, as everyone knows, his passionate loyalty to the cause of the
+Allies had brought him to take a step which in all but forty years of
+life in England he had never before contemplated. On July 26th, 1915, he
+became naturalised as a British subject. The letters now published give
+the fullest expression to his motives; it has seemed right to let them
+do so, mingled as his motives were with many strains, some of them
+reactions of disappointment over the official attitude of his native
+country at that time. If he had lived to see America join the Allies he
+would have had the deepest joy of his life; and perhaps it is worth
+mentioning that his relations with the American Embassy in London had
+never been so close and friendly as they became during those last
+months.
+
+On the morning of December 2nd he had a stroke, presently followed by
+another, from which he rallied at first, but which bore him down after
+not many days. His sister-in-law, with her eldest son and daughter, came
+at once from America to be with him, and he was able to enjoy their
+company. He was pleased, too, by a sign of welcome offered to him in his
+new citizenship. Among the New Year honours there was announced the
+award to him of the Order of Merit, and the insignia were brought to his
+bedside by Lord Bryce, a friend of many years. Through the following
+weeks he gradually sank; he died on February 28th, 1916, within two
+months of his seventy-third birthday. His body was cremated, and the
+funeral service held at Chelsea Old Church on March 3rd, a few yards
+from his own door on the quiet river-side.
+
+
+
+
+_To Howard Sturgis._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+[August 4th, 1914.]
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearly beloved Howard!
+*/
+
+I think one of the reasons is that I have so allowed silence and
+separation to _accumulate_--the effort of breaking through the mass
+becomes in that case so formidable; the mass being thus the monstrous
+mountain that blocks up the fair scene and that one has to explain away.
+I am engaged in that effort at the present moment, however--I _am_
+breaking through the mass, boring through the mountain, I feel, as I put
+pen to paper--and this, too, though I don't, though I shan't, though I
+can't particularly "explain." And why _should_ I treat you at this time
+of day--or, to speak literally, of night--as if you had begun suddenly
+not to be able to understand without a vulgar demonstration on the
+blackboard? As I should never dream of resorting to that mode of public
+proof that I tenderly and unabatedly love you, so why should I think it
+necessary to chalk it up there that there was, all those strange weeks
+and months during which I made you no sign, an absolute _inevitability_
+in the graceless appearance? I call them strange because of the
+unnatural face that they wear to me now--but they had at the time the
+deadliest familiar look; the look of all the other parts of life that
+one was giving up and doing without--even if it didn't resemble them in
+their comparative dismissability. From them I learned perforce at last
+to avert my head, whereas there wasn't a moment of the long stretch
+during which I never either wrote or wired you for generous leave to
+come down to tea or dinner or both, there wasn't a moment when I hadn't,
+from Chelsea to Windsor, my eyes fondly fixed on you. You seemed rather
+to go out of their reach when I was placed in some pretended assurance
+that you had left Qu'acre for Scotland, but now that I hear, by some
+equally vague voice of the air, that you are still at home--and this
+appears more confirmed to me--I have you intensely before me again; yes,
+and so vividly that I even make you out as sometimes looking at _me_. I
+think in fact it's a good deal the magnanimous sadness I so catch from
+you that makes me feel to-night how little longer I can bear my own
+black air of having fallen away while I yet really and intensely stick,
+and therefore get on the way to you again, so far as this will take me.
+
+It will soon be three weeks since I came back here from Chelsea--which I
+was capable of leaving, yes, without having made you a sign. It was a
+case, dearest Howard, of the essential inevitability--the mark you
+yourself must in these days so recognise in all your omissions and
+frustrations, all your lapses from the mortal act. Even you must have to
+know them so on your own part--and you must feel them just to _have_ to
+be as they are (and as you are.) That was the way the like things had to
+be with me--as _I_ was; and it's to insult our long and perfect
+understanding not to feel that you have treasures of the truest
+interpretation of everything whatever in our common condition. Oh how I
+so want at last, all the same, to have a direct word or two from your
+blest self on your own share of that community! I have questioned
+whomsoever I could in any faint degree suppose worth questioning on this
+score of the _show_ you are making--but of course, I admit, elicited no
+word of any real value. Five words of your own articulation--by which I
+mean scratches of your own pen--will go further with me than any amount
+of roundabout twaddle. I hear of predatory loose women quartered upon
+you again--and I groan in my far-off pain; especially when I reflect
+that _their_ fatuous account would be that you were in health and joy
+quite exactly by reason of them. I think the great public blackness most
+of all makes me send out this signal to you--as if I were lighting the
+twinkle of a taper to set over against you in my window.
+
+_August 5th._ The taper went out last night, and I am afraid I now
+kindle it again to a very feeble ray--for it's vain to try to talk as if
+one weren't living in a nightmare of the deepest dye. How can what is
+going on not be to one as a huge horror of blackness? Of course that is
+what it is to you, dearest Howard, even as it is to your infinitely
+sickened inditer of these lines. The plunge of civilization into this
+abyss of blood and darkness by the wanton feat of those two infamous
+autocrats is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which
+we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually
+bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous
+years were all the while really making for and _meaning_ is too tragic
+for any words. But one's reflections don't really bear being uttered--at
+least we each make them enough for our individual selves and I didn't
+mean to smother you under mine in addition to your own....
+
+But good-night again--my lamp now is snuffed out. Have I mentioned to
+you that I am not here alone?--having with me my niece Peggy and her
+younger brother--both "caught" for the time, in a manner; though
+willing, even glad, as well as able, to bear their poor old appalled
+Uncle the kindest company--very much the same sort as William bears you.
+I embrace you, and him too, and am ever your faithfullest old
+
+/*
+_H. J._
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Henry James, junior._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+August 6th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Harry,
+*/
+
+...Everything is of the last abnormalism now, and no convulsion, no
+historic event of any such immensity can ever have taken place in such a
+turn-over of a few hours and with such a measureless rush--the whole
+thing being, in other words, such an unprecedented combination of size
+and suddenness. There has never surely, since the world began, been any
+suddenness so big, so instantly mobilised, any more than there has been
+an equal enormity so sudden (if, after all, that _can_ be called sudden,
+or more than comparatively so, which, it is now clearly visible, had
+been brewing in the councils of the two awful Kaisers from a good while
+back.) The entrance of this country into the fray has been supremely
+inevitable--never doubt for an instant of that; up to a few short days
+ago she was still multiplying herself over Europe, in the magnificent
+energy and pertinacity of Edward Grey, for peace, and nothing but peace,
+in any way in which he could by any effort or any service help to
+preserve it; and has now only been beaten by what one can only call the
+huge immorality, the deep conspiracy for violence, for violence and
+wrong, of the Austrian and the German Emperors. Till the solemnly
+guaranteed neutrality of Belgium was three or four days ago deliberately
+violated by Germany, in defiance of every right, in her ferocious push
+to get at France by that least fortified way, we still hung in the
+balance here; but with that no "balance" was any longer possible, and
+the impulse to participate to the utmost in resistance and redress
+became as unanimous and as sweeping a thing in the House of Commons and
+throughout the land as it is possible to conceive. That is the one
+light, as one may call it, in so much sickening blackness--that in an
+hour, here, all breaches instantly healed, all divisions dropped, the
+Irish dissension, on which Germany had so clearly counted, dried up in a
+night--so that there is at once the most striking and interesting
+spectacle of united purpose. For myself, I draw a long breath that we
+are not to have failed France or shirked any shadow of a single one of
+the _implications_ of the Entente; for the reason that we go in only
+under the last compulsion, and with cleaner hands than we have ever had,
+I think, in any such matter since such matters were. (You see how I talk
+of "we" and "our"--which is so absolutely instinctive and irresistible
+with me that I should feel quite abject if I didn't!) However I don't
+want, for today, to disquisitionise on this great public trouble, but
+only to give you our personal news in the midst of it--for it's
+astonishing in how few days we have jumped into the sense of _being_ in
+the midst of it. England and the Continent are at the present hour full
+of hung-up and stranded Americans--those unable to get home and waiting
+for some re-establishment of violently interrupted traffic.... But
+good-bye, dearest Harry, now. It's a great blessing to be able to write
+you under this aid to lucidity--it's in fact everything, so I shall keep
+at it. I hope the American receipt of news is getting organised on the
+strong and sound lines it should be. Send this, of course, please, as
+soon as you can to your Mother and believe me your devotedest old Uncle,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Alfred Sutro._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+August 8th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear Mrs. Sutro,
+*/
+
+I have your good letter, but how impossible it seems to speak of
+anything _before_ one speaks of the tremendous public matter--and then
+how impossible to speak of anything _after_! But here goes for poor dear
+old George Sand and her ancient prattle (heaven forgive me!) to the
+extent that of course that autobiography (it _is_ a nice old set!) does
+in a manner notify one that it's going to be frank and copious,
+veracious and vivid, only during all its earlier part and in respect to
+the non-intimate things of the later prime of its author, and to stand
+off as soon as her personal plot began to thicken. You see it was a book
+written in middle life, not in old age, and the "thick" things, the
+thickest, of her remarkable past were still then very close behind her.
+But as an autobiography of the beginnings and earlier maturities of life
+it's indeed finer and jollier than anything there is.
+
+Yes, how your loss, for the present, of Nohant is swept away on the
+awful tide of the Great Interruption! This last is as mild a name for
+the hideous matter as one can consent to give--and I confess I live
+under the blackness of it as under a funeral pall of our murdered
+civilization. I say "for the present" about Nohant, and you, being young
+and buoyant, will doubtless pick up lost opportunities in some
+incalculable future; but that time looks to me as the past already
+looks--I mean the recent past of happy motor-runs, on May and June
+afternoons, down to the St. Alban's and the Witleys: disconnected and
+fabulous, fatuous, fantastic, belonging to another life and another
+planet. I find it such a mistake on my own part to have lived on--when,
+like other saner and safer persons, I might perfectly have not--into
+this unspeakable give-away of the whole fool's paradise of our past. It
+throws back so livid a light--_this_ was what we were so fondly working
+for! My aged nerves can scarcely stand it, and I bear up but as I can. I
+dip my nose, or try to, into the inkpot as often as I can; but it's as
+if there were no ink there, and I take it out smelling gunpowder,
+smelling blood, as hard as it did before. And yet I keep at it--or mean
+to; for (tell Alfred for his own encouragement--and pretty a one as I am
+to encourage!) that I hold we can still, he and I, _make_ a little
+civilization, the inkpot aiding, even when vast chunks of it, around us,
+go down into the abyss--and that the preservation of it depends upon our
+going on making it in spite of everything and sitting tight and not
+chucking up--wherefore, after all, _vive_ the old delusion and fill
+again the flowing stylograph--for I am sure Alfred writes with one....
+The afternoons and the aspects here are most incongruously lovely--and
+so must be yours. But it's goodnight now, and I am most truly yours,
+dear Mrs. Sutro,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Rhoda Broughton._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+August 10th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Rhoda!
+*/
+
+It is not a figure of speech but an absolute truth that even if I had
+not received your very welcome and sympathetic script I should be
+writing to you this day. I have been on the very edge of it for the last
+week--so had my desire to make you a sign of remembrance and
+participation come to a head; and verily I must--or may--almost claim
+that this all but "crosses" with your own. The only blot on our
+unanimity is that it's such an unanimity of woe. Black and hideous to me
+is the tragedy that gathers, and I'm sick beyond cure to have lived on
+to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been
+spared this wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen
+civilization grow and the worst become impossible. The tide that bore us
+along was then all the while moving to _this_ as its grand Niagara--yet
+what a blessing we didn't know it. It seems to me to _undo_ everything,
+everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way--but I
+avert my face from the monstrous scene!--you can hate it and blush for
+it without my help; we can each do enough of that by ourselves. The
+country and the season here are of a beauty of peace, and loveliness of
+light, and summer grace, that make it inconceivable that just across the
+Channel, blue as _paint_ today, the fields of France and Belgium are
+being, or about to be, given up to unthinkable massacre and misery. One
+is ashamed to admire, to enjoy, to take any of the normal pleasure, and
+the huge shining indifference of Nature strikes a chill to the heart and
+makes me wonder of what abysmal mystery, or villainy indeed, such a
+cruel smile is the expression. In the midst of it all at any rate we
+walked, this strange Sunday afternoon (9th), my niece Peggy, her
+youngest brother and I, about a mile out, across the blessed grass
+mostly, to see and have tea with a genial old Irish friend (Lady Mathew,
+who has a house here for the summer,) and came away an hour later
+bearing with us a substantial green volume, by an admirable eminent
+hand, which our hostess had just read with such a glow of satisfaction
+that she overflowed into easy lending. I congratulate you on having
+securely put it forth before this great distraction was upon us--for I
+am utterly pulled up in the midst of a rival effort by finding that my
+job won't at all consent to be done in the face of it. The picture of
+little private adventures simply fades away before the great public. I
+take great comfort in the presence of my two young companions, and above
+all in having caught my nephew by the coat-tail only _just_ as he was
+blandly starting for the continent on Aug. 1st. Poor Margaret Payson is
+trapped somewhere in France--she _having_ then started, though not for
+Germany, blessedly; and we remain wholly without news of her. Peggy and
+Aleck have four or five near maternal relatives lost in Germany--though
+as Americans they may fare a little less dreadfully there than if they
+were English. And I have numerous friends--we all have, haven't
+we?--inaccessible and unimaginable there; it's becoming an anguish to
+think of them. Nevertheless I do believe that we shall be again gathered
+into a blessed little Chelsea drawing-room--it will be like the
+reopening of the salons, so irrepressibly, after the French revolution.
+So only sit tight, and invoke your heroic soul, dear Rhoda, and believe
+me more than ever all-faithfully yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+August 19th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Edith,
+*/
+
+Your letter of the 15th has come--and may this reach you as directly,
+though it probably won't. No, I won't make it long--the less that the
+irrelevance of all remark, the utter extinction of everything, in the
+face of these immensities, leaves me as "all silent and all damned" as
+you express that it leaves _you_. I find it the strangest state to have
+lived on and on for--and yet, with its wholesale annihilation, it _is_
+somehow life. Mary Cadwal is admirably here--interesting and vivid and
+helpful to the last degree, and Bessie Lodge and her boy had the
+heavenly beauty, this afternoon, to come down from town (by train
+s'entend) rien que for tea--she even sneakingly went first to the inn
+for luncheon--and was off again by 5.30, nobly kind and beautiful and
+good. (She sails in the Olympic with her aunt on Saturday.) Mary C.
+gives me a sense of the interest of your Paris which makes me understand
+how it must attach you--how it would attach me in your place. Infinitely
+thrilling and touching such a community with the so all-round
+incomparable nation. I feel on my side an immense community here, where
+the tension is proportionate to the degree to which we feel engaged--in
+other words up to the chin, up to the eyes, if necessary. Life goes on
+after a fashion, but I find it a nightmare from which there is no waking
+save by sleep. I _go_ to sleep, as if I were dog-tired with action--yet
+feel like the chilled _vieillards_ in the old epics, infirm and helpless
+at home with the women, while the plains are ringing with battle. The
+season here is monotonously magnificent--and we look inconceivably off
+across the blue channel, the lovely rim, toward the nearness of the
+horrors that are in perpetration just beyond.... I manage myself to try
+to "work"--even if I _had_, after experiment, to give up trying to make
+certain little _fantoches_ and their private adventure _tenir debout_.
+_They_ are laid by on the shelf--the private adventure so utterly
+blighted by the public; but I have got hold of something else, and I
+find the effort of concentration to some extent an antidote. Apropos of
+which I thank you immensely for D'Annunzio's frenchified ode--a wondrous
+and magnificent thing in its kind, even if running too much--for my
+"taste"--to the vituperative and the execrational. The Latin Renascence
+mustn't be too much for and by _that_--for which its facile resources
+are so great.... What's magnificent to me in the French themselves at
+this moment is their lapse of expression.... May this not fail of you! I
+am your all-faithfully tender and true old
+
+/*
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+August 22nd, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Lucy,
+*/
+
+I have, I know, been quite portentously silent--your brief card of
+distress to-night (Saturday p.m.--) makes me feel it--but you on your
+side will also have felt the inevitability of this absence of mere vain
+and vague remark in the presence of such prodigious realities. My
+overwhelmed sense of them has simply left me nothing to say--the rupture
+with all the blest old proportion of things has been so complete and
+utter, and I've felt as if most of my friends (from very few of whom I
+have heard at all) were so wrapped in gravities and dignities of silence
+that it wasn't fair to write to them simply to make _them_ write. And
+so it has gone--the whole thing defying expression so that one has just
+stared at the horror and watched it grow. But I am not writing now,
+dearest old friend, to express either alarm or despair--and this mainly
+by reason of there being so high a decency in _not_ doing so. I hate not
+to possess my soul--and oh I should like, while I am _about_ that, to
+possess yours for you too. One doesn't possess one's soul unless one
+squares oneself a good deal, in fact very hard indeed, for the purpose;
+but in proportion as one succeeds that means preparation, and
+preparation means confidence, and confidence means force, and that is as
+far as we need go for the moment. Your few words express a bad
+apprehension which I don't share--and which even our straight outlook
+here over the blue channel of all these amazing days, toward the
+unthinkable horrors of its almost other edge, doesn't _make_ me share. I
+don't in the least believe that the Germans will be "here"--with us
+generally--because I don't believe--I don't admit--that anything so
+abject as the allowance of it by our overwhelming Fleet, in conditions
+making it so tremendously difficult for them (the G.'s), is in the least
+conceivable. Things are not going to be so easy for them as
+that--however uneasy they may be for ourselves. I _insist_ on a great
+confidence--I cultivate it as resolutely as I can, and if we were only
+nearer together I think I should be able to help you to some of the
+benefit of it. I have been very thankful to be on this spot all these
+days--I mean in this sympathetic little old house, which has somehow
+assuaged in a manner the nightmare. One invents _arts_ for assuaging
+it--of which some work better than others. The great sore sense I find
+the futility of talk--_about_ the cataclysm: this is so impossible that
+I can really almost talk about other things!... I am supposing you see a
+goodish many people--since one hears that there are so many in town,
+and I am glad for you of that: solitude in these conditions being grim,
+even if society is bleak! I try to read and I rather succeed, and also
+even to write, and find the effort of it greatly pays. Lift up your
+heart, dearest friend--I believe we shall meet to embrace and look back
+and tell each other how appallingly interesting the whole thing "was." I
+gather in all of you right affectionately and am yours, in particular,
+dearest Lucy, so stoutly and tenderly,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To William James, junior._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+August 31st, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Bill,
+*/
+
+Very blest to me this morning, and very blest to Peggy and Aleck and me,
+your momentous and delightful cable. I don't know that we are either of
+us much versed in the weight of babies, but we have strong and, I find,
+unanimous views about their sex, which your little adventurer into this
+world of woe has been so good as gracefully to meet. We are all three
+thoroughly glad of the nephew in him, if only because of being glad of
+the little brother. We are convinced that that's the way his parents
+feel, and I hope the feeling is so happy a one for Alice as to be doing
+her all sorts of good. Admirable the "all well" of your cable: may it go
+straight on toward better and better....
+
+Our joy in your good news is the only gleam of anything of the sort with
+which we have been for a long time visited; as an admirable letter from
+you to Aleck, which he read me last night, seemed to indicate (more than
+anything we have yet had from home) some definite impression of. Yes
+indeed, we are steeped in the very air of anxieties and horrors--and
+they all seem, where we are situated, so little far away. I have written
+two or three times to Harry, and also to your Mother, since leaving
+London, and Peggy and Aleck in particular have had liberal responses
+from each. But those received up to now rather suggest a failure quite
+to grasp the big black realities of the whole case roundabout us far and
+near. The War blocks out of course--for that you have realised--every
+other object and question, every other thinkability, in life; and I
+needn't tell you what a strain it all is on the nerves and the faith of
+a poor old damaged septuagenarian uncle. The extraordinary thing is the
+way that every interest and every connection that seemed still to exist
+up to exactly a month ago has been as annihilated as if it had never
+lifted a head in the world at all.... That isn't, with reflection, so
+far as one can "calmly" reflect, _all_ that I see; on the contrary there
+is a way of looking at what is taking place that is positively helpful,
+or almost, when one can concentrate on it at all--which is difficult. I
+mean the view that the old systematic organisation and consecration of
+such forces as are now let loose, of their unspeakable infamy and
+insanity, is undergoing such a triumphant exhibition in respect to the
+loathsomeness and madness of the same, that it is what we must all
+together be most face to face with when the actual blackness of the
+smoke shall have cleared away. But I can't go into that now, any more
+than I can make this letter long, dearest Bill and dearest Alice, or can
+say anything just now in particular reference to what is happening....
+You get in Boston probably about as much news as we do, for this is
+enormously, and quite justly, under control of the authorities, and
+nothing reaches us but what is in the interest of operations,
+precautions, every kind of public disposition and consideration, for the
+day and hour. This country is making an enormous effort--so far as its
+Fleet is concerned a triumphantly powerful and successful one; and there
+is a great deal more of the effort to come. Roughly speaking, Germany,
+immensely prepared and with the biggest fighting-power ever known on
+earth, has staked her all on a colossal onslaught, and yet is far even
+yet from having done with it what she believed she would in the time, or
+on having done it _as_ she first designed. The horrors of the
+crucifixion of Belgium, the general atrocity of the Kaiser's methods,
+haven't even yet entirely availed, and there are chances not
+inconsiderable, even while I write, that they won't entirely avail; that
+is that certain things may still happen to prevent them. But it is all
+for the moment tremendously dark and awful. We kind of huddle together
+here and try to lead our lives in such small dignity and piety as we
+may.... More and more is it a big fact in the colossal public situation
+that Germany is absolutely locked up at last in a maritime way, with all
+the seas swept of her every vessel of commerce. She appears now
+absolutely corked, her commerce and communications dead as a doornail,
+and the British activity in undisturbed possession of the seas. This by
+itself is an enormous service, an immeasurable and finally determinant
+one, surely, rendered by this country to the Allies. But after hanging
+over dearest Alice ever so blessingly again, and tickling the new little
+infant phenomenon with a now quite practised old affectionate nose, I
+must pull off and be just, dearest Bill, your own all-fondest old Uncle,
+
+/*
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+August 31st, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest L. C.
+*/
+
+I am reduced again, you see, to this aid to correspondence, which I feel
+myself indeed fortunate to possess, under the great oppression of the
+atmosphere in which we live. It makes recuperation doubly difficult in
+case of recurrence of old ailments, and I have been several days in bed
+with a renewed kick of the virus of my dismal long illness of 1910-11
+and am on my feet to-day for the first time. Fortunately I know better
+how to deal with it now, and with a little time I come round. But it
+leaves me heavy-fingered. One is heavy-everything, for that matter, amid
+these horrors--over which I won't and can't expatiate, and hang and
+pore. That way madness lies, and one must try to economise, and not
+disseminate, one's forces of resistance--to the prodigious public total
+of which I think we can each of us, in his or her own way, individually,
+and however obscurely, contribute. To this end, very kindly, _don't send
+me on newspapers_--I very particularly beseech you; it seems so to
+suggest that you imagine us living in privation of, or indifference to
+them: which is somehow such a sorry image. We are drenched with them and
+live up to our neck in them; _all_ the London morning ones by 8 a.m.,
+and every scrap of an evening one by about 6.40 p.m. We see the former
+thus at exactly the same hour we should in town, and the last forms in
+which the latter appear very little more belatedly. They are not just
+now very exhilarating--but I can only take things in in waiting
+silence--bracing myself unutterably, and holding on somehow (though to
+God knows what!) in presence of perpetrations so gratuitously and
+infamously hideous as the destruction of Louvain and its accompaniments,
+for which I can't believe there won't be a tremendous day of reckoning.
+Frederic Harrison's letter in to-day's "Times" will have been as much a
+relief to my nerves and yours, and to those of millions of others, as to
+his own splendidly fine old inflamed ones; meaning by nerves everything
+that shall most formidably clamour within us for the recorded execration
+of history. I find this more or less helpless assisting at the so
+long-drawn-out martyrdom of the admirable little Belgium the very
+intensest part of one's anguish, and my one support in it is to lose
+myself in dreams and visions of what must be done eventually, with
+_real_ imagination and magnanimity, and above all with _real_ material
+generosity, to help her unimaginable lacerations to heal. The same
+inscrutable irony of ethereal peace and serenity goes on shedding itself
+here from the face of nature, who has "turned out" for us such a summer
+of blandness and beauty as would have been worthy of a better cause. It
+still goes on, though of course we should be glad of more rain; but
+occasional downfalls even of that heavenly dew haven't quite failed us,
+and more of it will very presumably now come. There is no one here in
+particular for me to tell you of, and if it weren't that Peggy is with
+me I should be pretty high and dry in the matter of human converse and
+contact. She intensely prefers to remain with me for the present--and if
+she _should_ have to leave I think I on my side should soon after have
+to return to my London perch; finding as I do that almost absolute
+solitude under the assault of all the horrors isn't at all a good thing
+for me. However, that is not a practical question yet.... I think of
+you all faithfully and fondly.
+
+/*
+Ever your old devotedest
+
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+/#
+ This moment was that of the height of the "Russian legend," and
+ like everyone else H. J. was eagerly welcoming the multitudinous
+ evidence of the passage of a vast Russian army through England to
+ France.
+#/
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+September 1st, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear E. W.,
+*/
+
+Cast your intelligent eye on the picture from this a.m.'s Daily Mail
+that I send you and which you may not otherwise happen to see. Let it
+rest, with all its fine analytic power, on the types, the dress, the
+caps and the boots of the so-called Belgians disembarked--disembarked
+from _where, juste ciel_!--at Ostend, and be struck as I have been as
+soon as the thing was shown to me this a.m. by the notice-taking Skinner
+(my brave Dr.,) so much more notice-taking than so many of the persons
+around us. If they are not straight out of the historic, or even
+fictive, page of Tolstoy, I will eat the biggest pair of moujik boots in
+the collection! With which Skinner told me of speech either this morning
+or last evening, on his part, with a man whose friend or brother, I
+forget which, had just written him from Sheffield: "Train after train of
+Russians have been passing through here to-day (Sunday); they _are_ a
+rum-looking lot!" But an enormous quantity of this apparently
+corroborative testimony from _seen trains_, with their contents stared
+at and wondered at, has within two or three days kept coming in from
+various quarters. Quantum valeat! I consider the reproduced snap-shot
+enclosed, however, a regular gem of evidence. What a blessing, after
+all, is our--_our_--refined visual sense!
+
+This isn't really by way of answer to your own most valuable letter this
+morning received--but that is none the less gratefully noted, and shall
+have its independent acknowledgment. I am better, thank you, distinctly;
+the recovery of power to eat again means everything to me. I greatly
+appreciated your kind little letter to my most interesting and admirable
+Peggy, whom you left under the charm.
+
+My own small domestic plot here rocks beneath my feet, since yesterday
+afternoon, with the decision at once to volunteer of my invaluable and
+irreplaceable little Burgess! I had been much expecting and even hoping
+for it, but definitely shrinking from the responsibility of
+administering the push with my own hand: I wanted the impulse to play up
+of itself. It now appears that it had played up from the first,
+inwardly--with the departure of the little Rye contingent for Dover a
+fortnight ago. The awfully decent little chap had then felt the pang of
+patriotism and martial ardour _rentres_ and had kept silent for fear of
+too much incommoding me by doing otherwise. But now the clearance has
+taken place in the best way in the world, and I part with him in a day
+or two.
+
+...This is all now save that I am always yours too much for typists,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Richard Watson Gilder._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+September 2nd, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Helena,
+*/
+
+...We are passing here, as you may well suppose, through the regular
+fiery furnace, the sharpest ordeal and the most tremendous, even on
+these shores, that the generations have been through since any keeping
+of accounts, and yet mild, as one keeps reminding oneself, in comparison
+with the lacerations of France and the martyrdoms of Belgium. It leaves
+one small freedom of mind for general talk, it presses, all the while,
+with every throb of consciousness; and if during the first days I felt
+in the air the recall of our Civil War shocks and anxieties, and
+hurryings and doings, of 1861, etc., the pressure in question has
+already become a much nearer and bigger thing, and a more formidable and
+tragic one, than anything we of the North in those years had to face. It
+lights up for me rather what the tension was, what it must have been, in
+the South--though with difference even in that correspondence. The South
+was more destitute than these rich countries are likely even at the
+worst to find themselves, but on the other hand the German hordes, to
+speak only of them, are immeasurably more formidable and merciless than
+our comparatively benign Northern armies ever approached being. However,
+I didn't mean to go into these historical parallels--any more than I
+feel able, dear Helena, to go into many points of any kind. One of the
+effects of this colossal convulsion is that all connection with
+everything of every kind that has gone before seems to have broken short
+off in a night, and nothing ever to have happened of the least
+consequence or relevance, beside what is happening now. Therefore when
+you express to me so beautifully and touchingly your interest in my
+"Notes" of--another life and planet, as one now can but feel, I have to
+make an enormous effort to hitch the allusion to my present
+consciousness. I knew you would enter deeply into the chapter about
+Minnie Temple, and had your young, your younger intimacy with her at the
+back of my consciousness even while I wrote. I had in mind a small, a
+very small, number of persons who would be peculiarly reached by what I
+was doing and would really know what I was talking about, as the mass of
+others couldn't, and you were of course in that distinguished little
+group. I could but leave you to be as deeply moved as I was sure you
+would be, and surely I can but be glad to have given you the occasion. I
+remember your telling me long ago that you were not allowed during that
+last year to have access to her; but I myself, for most of it, was still
+further away, and yet the vividness of her while it went on seems none
+the less to have been preserved for us all alike, only waiting for a
+right pressure of the spring to bring it out. What is most pathetic in
+the light of to-day has seemed to me the so tragically little real care
+she got, the little there was real knowledge enough, or presence of mind
+enough, to do for her, so that she was probably sacrificed in a degree
+and a way that would be impossible to-day. I thank you at any rate for
+letting me know that you have, as you say, relievingly wept. For the
+rest your New England summer life, amid your abounding hills and woods
+and waters, to say nothing of the more intimate strong savour your
+children must impart to it, shines upon me here, from far across the
+sea, as a land of brighter dream than it's easy to think of mankind
+anywhere as dreaming. I am delighted to hear that these things are thus
+comfortable and auspicious with you. The interest of your work on
+Richard's Life wouldn't be interesting to you if it were not tormenting,
+and wouldn't be tormenting if it were not so considerably worth doing.
+But, as I say, one sees everything without exception that has been a
+part of past history through the annihilation of battle smoke if of
+nothing else, and all questions, again, swoon away into the obscure. If
+you have got something to do, stick to it tight, and do it with faith
+and force; some things will, no doubt, eventually be redeemed. I don't
+speak of the actualities of the public situation here at this
+moment--because I can't say things in the air about them. But this
+country is making the most enormous, the most invaluable, and the most
+inspired effort she has ever had to put her hand to, and though the
+devastating Huns are thundering but just across the Channel--which looks
+so strangely serene in a present magnificence of summer--she won't have
+failed, I am convinced, of a prodigious saving achievement.
+
+/*
+Yours, my dear Helena, all affectionately,
+
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+/#
+ It should be mentioned that Mrs. Wharton had come to England, but
+ was planning an early return to Paris.
+#/
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+September 3rd, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear E. W.,
+*/
+
+It's a great luxury to be able to go on in this way. I wired you at once
+this morning how very glad indeed I shall be to take over your
+superfluous young man as a substitute for Burgess, if he will come in
+the regular way, _my_ servant entirely, not borrowed from you
+(otherwise than in the sense of his going back to you whenever you shall
+want him again;) and remaining with me on a wage basis settled by me
+with him, and about the same as Burgess's, if possible, so long as the
+latter is away....
+
+I am afraid indeed now, after this lapse of days, that the "Russian"
+legend doesn't very particularly hold water--some information I have
+this morning in the way of a positive denial of the War Office points
+that way, unless the sharp denial is conceivable _quand meme_. The only
+thing is that there remains an extraordinary residuum of fact to be
+accounted for: it being indisputable by too much convergence of
+testimony that trains upon trains of troops seen in the light of day,
+and not recognised by innumerable watchers and wonderers as English,
+were pouring down from the north and to the east during the end of last
+week and the beginning of this. It seems difficult that there should
+have been that amount of variously scattered hallucination,
+misconception, fantastication or whatever--yet I chuck up the sponge!
+
+Far from brilliant the news to-day of course, and likely I am afraid to
+act on your disposition to go back to Paris; which I think a very
+gallant and magnificent and ideal one, but which at the same time I well
+understand, within you, the urgent force of. I feel I cannot take upon
+myself to utter any relevant remark about it at all--any plea against
+it, which you wouldn't in the least mind, once the thing _determined_
+for you, or any in favour of it, which you so intensely don't require. I
+understand too well--that's the devil of such a state of mind about
+everything. Whatever resolution you take and apply you will put it
+through to your very highest honour and accomplishment of service; _sur
+quoi_ I take off my hat to you down to the ground, and only desire not
+to worry you with vain words.... I kind of hanker for any scrap of
+really domestic fact about you all that I may be able to extract from
+Frederick if he comes. But I shall get at you again quickly in this way,
+and am your all-faithfullest
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+/#
+ It will be remembered that the first news of the bombardment of
+ Rheims Cathedral suggested greater destruction than was the fact at
+ that time. The wreckage was of course carried much further before
+ the end of the war.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+September 21st, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Edith,
+*/
+
+Rheims is the most unspeakable and immeasurable horror and infamy--and
+what is appalling and heart-breaking is that it's "_for ever and ever_."
+But no words fill the abyss of it--nor touch it, nor relieve one's heart
+nor light by a spark the blackness; the ache of one's howl and the
+anguish of one's execration aren't mitigated by a shade, even as one
+brands it as the most hideous crime ever perpetrated against the mind of
+man. There it _was_--and now all the tears of rage of all the bereft
+millions and all the crowding curses of all the wondering ages will
+never bring a stone of it back! Yet one tries--even now--tries to get
+something from saying that the measure is so full as to overflow at last
+in a sort of vindictive deluge (though for all the stones that _that_
+will replace!) and that the arm of final retributive justice becomes by
+it an engine really in some degree proportionate to the act. I
+positively do think it helps me a little, to think of how they can be
+made to wear the shame, in the pitiless glare of history, forever and
+ever--and not even to get rid of it when they are maddened, literally,
+by the weight. And for that the preparations must have already at this
+hour begun: how _can't_ they be as a tremendous force fighting on the
+side, fighting in the very fibres, of France? I think too
+somehow--though I don't know _why_, practically--of how nothing
+conceivable could have so damned and dished them forever in our great
+art-loving country!
+
+...If you go on Thursday I can't hope to see you again for the present,
+but all my blessings on all your splendid resolution, your courage and
+charity! Right must you be not to take back with you any of your
+Englishry--it's no place for them yet. Frederick will hang on your first
+signal to him again--and meanwhile is a very great boon to me. I wish I
+could do something for White, if (as I take it) he stays behind; put him
+up at the Athenaeum or something.... All homage and affection to you,
+dearest Edith, from your desolate and devoted old
+
+/*
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. T. S. Perry._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+Lamb House, Rye.
+September 22nd, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Lilla,
+*/
+
+Forgive my use of this fierce legibility to speak to you in my now at
+best faltering accents. We eat and drink, and talk and walk and think,
+we sleep and wake and live and breathe only the War, and it is a bitter
+regimen enough and such as, frankly, I hoped I shouldn't live on,
+disillusioned and horror-ridden, to see the like of. Not, however, that
+there isn't an uplifting and thrilling side to it, as far as this
+country is concerned, which makes unspeakably for interest, makes one
+at hours forget all the dreadfulness and cling to what it means in
+another way. What it above all means, and has meant for me all summer,
+is that, looking almost straight over hence from the edge of the
+Channel, toward the horizon-rim just beyond the curve of which the
+infamous violation of Belgium has been all these weeks kept up, I
+haven't had to face the shame of our not having drawn the sword for the
+massacred and tortured Flemings, and not having left our inestimable
+France, after vows exchanged, to shift for herself. England all but
+grovelled in the dust to the Kaiser for peace up to the very latest
+hour, but when his last reply was simply to let loose his hordes on
+Belgium in silence, with no account of the act to this country or to
+France beyond the most fatuously arrogant "Because I choose to, damn
+you!" in all recorded history, there began for us here a process of
+pulling ourselves together of which the end is so far from being yet
+that I feel it as only the most rudimentary beginning. However, I said I
+couldn't talk--and here I am talking, and I mustn't go on, it all takes
+me too far; I must only feel that all your intelligence and all your
+sympathy, yours and dear Thomas's, and those of every one of you, is
+intensely with us--and that the appalling and crowning horror of the
+persistent destruction of Rheims, which we just learn, isn't even wanted
+to give the measure of the insanity of ferocity and presumption against
+which Europe is making a stand. Do ask Thomas to write me a
+participating word: and think of me meanwhile as very achingly and
+shakily but still all confidently and faithfully yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Rhoda Broughton._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+October 1st, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Rhoda,
+*/
+
+...For myself, with Peggy's necessary departure from my side some three
+weeks ago, I could no longer endure the solitudinous (and platitudinous)
+side of my rural retreat; I found I simply ate my heart out in the state
+of privation of converse (any converse that counted) and of remoteness
+from the source of information--as our information goes. So, having very
+blessedly this perch to come to, here I am while the air of superficial
+summer still reigns. London is agitating but interesting--in certain
+aspects I find it even quite uplifting--and the mere feeling that the
+huge burden of one's tension is shared is something of a relief, even if
+it does show the strain as so much reflected back to one. Immensely do I
+understand the need of younger men to take refuge from it in _doing_,
+for all they are worth--to be old and doddering now is for a male person
+not at all glorious. But if to _feel_, with consuming passion, under the
+call of the great cause, is any sort of attestation of use, then I
+contribute my fond vibration.... During these few days in town I have
+seen almost no one, and this London, which is, to the eye, immensely
+full of people (I mean of the sort who are not here usually at this
+season,) is also a strange, rather sinister London in the sense that
+"social intercourse" seems (and most naturally) scarcely to exist. I'm
+afraid that even your salon, were you here, would inevitably become more
+or less aware of the shrinkage. Let that console you a little for not
+yet setting it up. Dear little ---- I shall try to see--I grieve
+deeply over her complication of horrors. We all have the latter, but
+some people (and those the most amiable and most innocent) seem to have
+them with an extra devilish twist. Not "sweets" to the sweet now, but a
+double dose of bitterness. It's all a huge strain and a huge nightmare
+and a huge unspeakability--but that isn't my last word or my last
+_sense_. This great country has found, and is still more finding,
+certain parts of herself again that had seemed for long a good deal
+lost. But here they are now--magnificent; and we haven't yet seen a
+quarter of them. The whole will press down the scale of fortune. What we
+all are together (in our so unequal ways) "out for" we shall _do_,
+through thick and thin and whatever enormity of opposition. We
+sufficiently want to and we sufficiently _can_--both by material and
+volition. Therefore if we don't achieve, it will only be because we have
+lost our essential, our admirable, our soundest and roundest
+identity--and that is simply inconceivable to your faithful and
+affectionate old
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edmund Gosse._
+
+/#
+ The allusions in the following are to an article of Mr. Gosse's on
+ the effect of the war of 1870 upon French literature, and to the
+ publication at this moment of H. J.'s _Notes on Novelists_.
+#/
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+October 15th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Gosse,
+*/
+
+...Your article for the Edinburgh is of an admirable interest,
+beautifully done, for the number of things so happily and vividly
+expressed in it, and attaching altogether from its emotion and its
+truth. How much, alas, to say on the whole portentous issue (I mean the
+particular one you deal with) must one feel there is--and the more the
+further about one looks and thinks! It makes me much want to see you
+again, and we must speedily arrange for that. I am probably doing on
+Saturday something very long out of order for me--going to spend Sunday
+with a friend near town; but as quickly as possible next week shall I
+appeal to you to come and lunch with me: in fact why not now ask you to
+let it be either on Tuesday or Wednesday, 20th or 21st, as suits you
+best, here, at 1.30? A word as to this at any time up to Tuesday a.m.,
+and by telephone as well as any otherhow, will be all sufficient.
+
+Momentous indeed your recall, with such exactitude and authority, of the
+effect in France of the 1870-71 cataclysm, and interesting to me as
+bringing back what I seem to myself to have been then almost closely
+present at; so that the sense of it all again flushes for me. I remember
+how the death of the immense old Dumas didn't in the least emerge to the
+naked eye, and how one vaguely heard that poor Gautier, "librarian to
+the Empress," had in a day found everything give way beneath him and let
+him go down and down! What analogies verily, I fear, with some of our
+present aspects and prospects! I didn't so much as know till your page
+told me that Jules Lemaitre was killed by that stroke: awfully tragic
+and pathetic fact. Gautier but just survived the whole other
+convulsion--it had led to his death early in '73. Felicitous
+Sainte-Beuve, who had got out of the way, with his incomparable
+penetration, just the preceding year! Had I been at your elbow I should
+have suggested a touch or two about dear old George Sand, holding out
+through the darkness at Nohant, but even there giving out some lights
+that are caught up in her letters of the moment. Beautiful that you put
+the case as you do for the newer and younger Belgians, and affirm it
+with such emphasis for Verhaeren--at present, I have been told, in this
+country. Immense my respect for those who succeed in going on, as you
+tell of Gaston Paris's having done during that dreadful winter and
+created life and force by doing. I myself find concentration of an
+extreme difficulty: the proportions of things have so changed and one's
+poor old "values" received such a shock. I say to myself that this is
+all the more reason why one should recover as many of them as possible
+and keep hold of them in the very interest of civilisation and of the
+honour of our race; as to which I am certainly right--but it takes some
+doing! Tremendous the little fact you mention (though indeed I had taken
+it for granted) about the _absolute_ cessation of ---- 's last
+"big sale" after Aug. 1st. Very considerable his haul, fortunately--and
+_if_ gathered in!--up to the eve of the fell hour.... All I myself hear
+from Paris is an occasional word from Mrs. Wharton, who is full of
+ardent activity and ingenious devotion there--a really heroic plunge
+into the breach. But this is all now, save that I am sending you a
+volume of gathered-in (for the first time) old critical papers, the
+publication of which was arranged for in the spring, and the book then
+printed and seen through the press, so that there has been for me a kind
+of painful inevitability in its so grotesquely and false-notedly coming
+out now. But no--I also say to myself--nothing serious and felt and
+sincere, nothing "good," is anything but essentially in order to-day,
+whether economically and "attractively" so or not! Put my volume at any
+rate away on a high shelf--to be taken down again only in the better and
+straighter light that I invincibly believe in the dawning of. Let me
+hear, however sparely, about Tuesday or Wednesday and believe me all
+faithfully yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Grace Norton._
+
+/#
+ "W. E. D." is William Darwin, brother-in-law to Charles Eliot
+ Norton. "Richard" is the latter's son, Director of the American
+ School of Archaeology in Rome, at this time engaged in organising a
+ motor-ambulance of American volunteers in France. He unhappily died
+ of meningitis in Paris, August 2, 1918.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+October 16th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Very dear old Friend,
+*/
+
+How can I thank you enough for the deep intelligence and sympathy of
+your beautiful and touching little letter, this morning received, or
+sufficiently bless the impulse that made you write it? For really the
+strain and stress of the whole horribly huge case over here is such that
+the hand of understanding and sympathy reached out across the sea causes
+a grateful vibration, and among all our vibrations those of gratitude
+don't seem appointed to be on the whole the most numerous: though indeed
+I mustn't speak as if within our very own huge scope we have _not_
+plenty of those too! That we can feel, or that the individual, poor
+resisting-as-he-can creature, may on such a scale feel, and so intensely
+and potently, _with_ the endlessly multitudinous others who are subject
+to the same assault, and such hundreds of thousands of them to so much
+greater--this is verily his main great spiritual harbourage; since so
+many of those that need more or less to serve have become now but the
+waste of waters! Happy are those of your and my generation, in very
+truth, who have been able, or may still be, to do as dear W. E. D. so
+enviably did, and close their eyes without the sense of deserting their
+post or dodging their duty. We feel, don't we? that we have stuck to and
+done ours long enough to have a right to say "Oh, _this_ wasn't in the
+bargain; it's the claim of Fate only in the form of a ruffian or a
+swindler, and with such I'll have no dealing:"--the perfection of which
+felicity, I have but just heard, so long after the event, was that of
+poor dear fine Jules Lemaitre, who, unwell at the end of July and having
+gone down to his own little native _pays_, on the Loire, to be _soigne_,
+read in the newspaper of the morrow that war upon France had been
+declared, and fell back on the instant into a swoon from which he never
+awoke.... The happiest, almost the enviable (except those who may
+emulate William) are the younger doers of things and engagers in action,
+like our admirable Richard (for I find him so admirable!) whom I can't
+sufficiently commend and admire for having thrown himself into Paris,
+where he can most serve. But I won't say much more now, save that I
+think of you with something that I should call the liveliest renewal of
+affection if my affection for you had ever been _less_ than lively! I
+rejoice in whatever Peggy has been able to tell you of me; but don't
+you, on your side, fall into the error of regretting that she came back.
+I have done nothing so much since her departure as bless the day of it;
+so wrong a place does this more and more become for those whose life
+isn't definitely fixed here, and so little could I have borne the
+anxiety and responsibility of having her on my mind in addition to
+having myself! Have me on _yours_, dearest Grace, as much as you like,
+for it is exquisitely sensible to me that you so faithfully and tenderly
+do; and that does nothing but good--real helpful good, to yours all
+affectionately,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+/#
+ A passage (translated by M. Alfred de Saint Andre) from H. J.'s
+ letter to Mrs. Wharton of September 3rd (see above) had been read
+ at a meeting of the Academie Francaise, and published in the
+ _Journal des Debats_. The Hotel d'Iena was at this time the
+ headquarters of the British Red Cross Society in Paris.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+October 17th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Very dear old Friend!
+*/
+
+Yesterday came your brave letter with its two so remarkable enclosures
+and also the interesting one lent me to read by Dorothy Ward. The sense
+they give me of your heroic tension and valour is something I can't
+express--any more than I need to for your perfect assurance of it.
+Posted here in London your letter was by the Walter Gays, whom I hunger
+and thirst for, though without having as yet got more into touch than
+through a telephone message on their behalf an hour ago by the manager,
+or whoever, of their South Kensington Hotel. I most unfortunately can't
+see them this p.m. as they proposed, as I am booked for the long
+un-precedented adventure of going down for a couple of nights to
+Qu'acre; in response to a most touching and not-to-be-resisted letter
+from its master. G. L. and P. L. are both to be there apparently; and I
+really rather welcome the break for a few hours with the otherwise
+unbroken pitch of London. However, let me not so much as name that in
+presence of your tremendous pitch of Paris; which however is all mixed,
+in my consciousness with yours, so that the intensity of yours drums
+through, all the while, as the big note. With all my heart do I bless
+the booming work (though not the booming anything else) which makes for
+you from day to day the valid _carapace_, the invincible, if not perhaps
+strictly invulnerable, armour. So golden-plated you shine straight over
+at me--and at us all!
+
+Of the liveliest interest to me of course the Debats version of the poor
+old Rheims passage of my letter to you at the time of the horror--in
+respect to which I feel so greatly honoured by such grand courtesy shown
+it, and by the generous translation, for which I shall at the first
+possible moment write and thank Saint Andre, from whom I have also had
+an immensely revealing small photograph of one of the aspects of the
+outraged cathedral, the vividest picture of the irreparable ravage.
+Splendid indeed and truly precious your report of the address of that
+admirable man to the Rheims tribunal at the hour of supreme trial. I
+echo with all my soul your lively homage to it, and ask myself if
+anything on earth can ever have been so blackly grotesque (or
+grotesquely black!) as the sublimely smug proposal of the Germans to
+wipe off the face of the world as a living force--substituting for it
+apparently _their_ portentous, their cumbrous and complicated idiom--the
+race that has for its native incomparable tone, such form, such speech,
+such reach, such an expressional consciousness, as humanity was on that
+occasion honoured and, so to speak, transfigured, by being able to find
+(M. Louis Bossu aiding!) in its chords. What a splendid creation of
+life, on the excellent man's part, just by play of the resource most
+familiar and most indispensable to him!
+
+This is all at this moment.... I have still five pounds of your cheque
+in hand--wanting only to bestow it where I practically see it used. I
+haven't sent more to Rye, but conferred three a couple of days since on
+an apparently most meritorious, and most intelligently-worked, refuge
+for some 60 or 70 that is being carried on, in the most fraternal
+spirit, by a real working-class circle at Hammersmith. I shall distil
+your balance with equal care; and I accompany each of your donations
+with a like sum of my own. We are sending off hence now every day
+regularly some 7 or 8 London papers to the Hotel d'Iena.
+
+/*
+Yours all faithfully,
+
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S. W.
+25th Oct., 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Thomas,
+*/
+
+I have had a couple of letters from you of late for which I thank you,
+but the contents of which reach me, you will understand, but through all
+the obstruction and oppression and obsession of all our conditions
+here--the strain and stress of which seem at times scarcely to be borne.
+Nevertheless we do bear them--to my sense magnificently; so that if
+during the very first weeks the sense of the huge public horror which
+seemed to have been appointed to poison the final dregs of my
+consciousness was nothing but sickening and overwhelming, so now I have
+lived on, as we all have, into much of another vision: I at least feel
+and take such an interest in the present splendid activity and position
+and office of this country, and in all the fine importance of it that
+beats upon one from all round, that the whole effect is uplifting and
+thrilling and consoling enough to carry one through whatever darkness,
+whatever dismals. As I think I said in a few words some weeks ago to
+Lilla, dear old England is not a whit less sound, less fundamentally
+sane, than she ever was, but in fact ever so much _finer_ and inwardly
+wiser, and has been appointed by the gods to find herself again, without
+more delay, in some of those aspects and on some of those sides that she
+had allowed to get too much overlaid and encrusted. She is doing this in
+the grand manner, and I can only say that I find the spectacle really
+splendid to assist at. After three months in the country I came back to
+London early, sequestration there not at all answering for nerves or
+spirits, and find myself in this place comparatively nearer to
+information and to supporting and suggestive contact. I don't say it
+doesn't all at the best even remain much of the nightmare that it
+instantly began by being: but gleams and rifts come through as from high
+and bedimmed, yet far-looking and, as it were, promising and portending
+windows: in fine I should feel I had lost something that ministers to
+life and knowledge if our collective experience, for all its big black
+streaks, hadn't been imposed on us. Let me not express myself, none the
+less, as if I could really thus talk about it all: I can't--it's all too
+close and too horrific and too unspeakable and too immeasureable. The
+facts, or the falsities, of "news" reach you doubtless as much as they
+reach us here--or rather with much more licence: and really what I have
+wanted most to say is how deeply I rejoice in the sympathetic sense of
+your words, few of these as your couple of notes have devoted to it. You
+speak of some other things--that is of the glorious "Institute," and of
+the fond severance of your connection with it, and other matters; but I
+suppose you will understand when I say that we are so shut in,
+roundabout, and so pressed upon by our single huge consciousness of the
+public situation, that all other sounds than those that immediately
+belong to it pierce the thick medium but with a muffled effect, and that
+in fine nothing really draws breath among us but the multitudinous
+realities of the War. Think what it must be when even the interest of
+the Institute becomes dim and _faint_! But I won't attempt to write you
+a word of really current history--ancient history by the time it reaches
+you: I throw myself back through all our anxieties and fluctuations,
+which I do my best not to be at the momentary mercy of, one way or the
+other, to certain deep fundamentals, which I can't go into either, but
+which become vivid and sustaining here in the light of all one sees and
+feels and gratefully takes in. I find the general community, the whole
+scene of energy, immensely sustaining and inspiring--so great a thing,
+every way, to be present at that it almost salves over the haunting
+sense of all the horrors: though indeed nothing can mitigate the huge
+Belgian one, the fact, not seen for centuries, of virtually a whole
+nation, harmless and innocent, driven forth into ruin and misery,
+suffering of the most hideous sort and on the most unprecedented
+scale--unless it be the way that England is making a tremendous pair of
+the tenderest arms to gather them into her ample, but so crowded lap.
+That is the most haunting thing, but the oppression and obsession are
+all heavy enough, and the waking up to them again each morning after the
+night's oblivion, if one has at all got it, is a really bad moment to
+pass. All life indeed resolves itself into the most ferocious practice
+in passing bad moments.... Stand all of you to your guns, and think and
+believe how you can really and measurably and morally help us! Yours,
+dear Thomas, all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Henry James, junior._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+October 30th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Harry,
+*/
+
+...Any "news," of the from day to day kind, would be stale and flat by
+the time this reaches you--and you know in New York at the moment of my
+writing, very much what we know of our grounds of anxiety and of hope,
+grounds of proceeding and production, moral and material, in every sort
+and shape. If we only had at this moment the extra million of men that
+the now so more or less incredible optimism and amiability of our spirit
+toward Germany, during these last abysmal years, kept knocking the
+bottom out of our having or preparing, the benefit and the effect would
+be heavenly to think of. And yet on the other hand I partly console
+myself for the comparatively awkward and clumsy fact that we are only
+growing and gathering in that amount of reinforcement _now_, by the
+shining light it throws on England's moral position and attitude, her
+predominantly incurable good-nature, the sublimity or the egregious
+folly, one scarcely knows which to call it, of her innocence in face of
+the most prodigiously massed and worked-out intentions of aggression of
+which "history furnishes an example." So it is that, though the country
+has become at a bound the hugest workshop of every sort of preparation
+conceivable, the men have, in the matter of numbers, to be wrought into
+armies _after_ instead of before--which has always been England's sweet
+old way, and has in the past managed to suffice. The stuff and the
+material fortunately, however, are admirable--having had already time to
+show to what tune they are; and, as I think I wrote your Mother the
+other day, one feels the resources, alike of character and of material,
+in the way of men and of every other sort of substance, immense; and so,
+not consenting to be heaved to and fro by the short view or the news of
+the moment, one rests one's mind on one or two big general
+convictions--primarily perhaps that of the certainty that Germany's last
+apprehension was that of a prolonged war, that it never entered for a
+moment into the arrogance of her programme, that she has every reason to
+find such a case ultra-grinding and such a prospect ultra-dismal:
+whereas nothing else was taken for granted here, as an absolute grim
+necessity, from the first. But I am writing you remarks quite as I
+didn't mean to; you have had plenty of these--at least Irving Street has
+had--before; and what I would a thousand times rather have, is some
+remarks from there, be they only of an ardent sympathy and
+participation--as of course whatever else in the world could they be? I
+am so utterly and passionately enlisted, up to my eyes and over my aged
+head, in the greatness of our cause, that it fairly sickens me not to
+find every imagination rise to it: the case--the case of the failure to
+rise--then seems to me so base and abject an exhibition! And yet I
+remind myself, even as I say [it], that the case has never really once
+happened to me--I have personally not encountered any low likeness of
+it; and therefore should rather have said that it _would_ so
+horrifically affect me _if_ it were supposable. England seems to me, at
+the present time, in so magnificent a position before the world, in
+respect to the history and logic of her action, that I don't see a grain
+in the scale of her rightness that doesn't count for attestation of it;
+and in short it really "makes up" almost for some of the huge horrors
+that constantly assault our vision, to find one can be on a "side," with
+all one's weight, that one never supposed likely to be offered one in
+such perfection, and that has only to be exposed to more and more light,
+to make one more glory, so to speak, for one's attachment, for one's
+association.
+
+_Saturday, Oct. 31st._ I had to break this off yesterday, and now can't
+do much for fear of missing today's, a Saturday's American post. Only
+everything I tried yesterday to say is more and more before me--all
+feelings and impressions intensifying by their very nature, as they do,
+from day to day under the general outward pressure, literally the
+pressure of _experience_ they from hour to hour receive; such experience
+and such pressure for instance as my having pulled up for a few minutes,
+as I was beginning this again, to watch from my windows a great swinging
+body of the London Scottish, as one supposes, marching past at the
+briskest possible step with its long line of freshly enlisted men behind
+it. These are now in London, of course, impressions of every hour, or of
+every moment; but there is always a particular big thrill in the
+collective passage of the stridingly and just a bit flappingly kilted
+and bonneted, when it isn't a question of mere parade or exercise, as we
+have been used to seeing it, but a suggestion, everything in the air so
+aiding, of a real piece of action, a charge or an irresistible press
+forward, on the field itself. Of a like suggestion, in a general way,
+was it to me yesterday afternoon to have gone again to see my--already
+"my"!--poor Belgian wounded at St. Bartholomew's; with whom it's quite a
+balm to one's feelings to have established something of a helpful
+relation, thanks to the power of freedom of speech, by which I mean use
+of idiom, between us--and thanks again to one's so penetrating
+impression of their stricken and bereft patience and mild fatalism. Not
+one of those with whom I talked the last time had yet come by the
+shadow of a clue or trace of any creature belonging to him, young wife
+or child or parent or brother, in all the thick obscurity of their
+scatterment; and once more I felt the tremendous force of such
+convulsions as the now-going-on in wrenching and dislocating the
+presupposable and rendering the actual monstrous of the hour, whatever
+it is, all the suffering creature _can_ feel. Even more interesting, and
+in a different way, naturally, was a further hour at St. B's with a
+couple of wardsful of British wounded, just straight back, by
+extraordinary good fortune, from the terrific fighting round about
+Ypres, which is still going on, but from which they had been got away in
+their condition, at once via Saint-Nazaire and Southampton; three or
+four of whom, all of the Grenadier Guards, who seemed genuinely glad of
+one's approach (not being for the time at all otherwise visited,) struck
+me as quite ideal and _natural_ soldier-stuff of the easy, the bright
+and instinctive, and above all the, in this country, probably quite
+inexhaustible, kind. Those I mention were intelligent specimens of
+course--one picked them out rather for their intelligent faces; but the
+ease, as I say, the goodhumour, the gaiety and simplicity, without the
+ghost of swagger, of their individual adaptability to their job, made an
+impression of them about as satisfactory, so to speak, as one could
+possibly desire it.... But this is all now--and you'll say it's enough!
+Ever your affectionate old Uncle,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Hugh Walpole._
+
+/#
+ Mr. Walpole was at this time in Russia.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+November 21st, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Hugh,
+*/
+
+This is a great joy--your letter of November 12th has just come, to my
+extreme delight, and I answer it, you see, within a very few hours. It
+is by far the best letter you have ever written me, and I am touched and
+interested by it more than I can say. Let me tell you at once that I
+sent you that last thing in type-copy because of an anxious calculation
+that such a form would help to secure its safe arrival. Your own scrap
+was a signal of the probable non-arrival of anything that seemed in the
+least to defy legibility; therefore I said to myself that what was
+flagrantly and blatantly legible _would_ presumably reach you.... I had
+better make use of this chance, however, to give you an inkling of _our_
+affairs, such as they are, rather than indulge in mere surmises and
+desires, fond and faithful though these be, about your own
+eventualities. London is of course under all our stress very
+interesting, to me deeply and infinitely moving--but on a basis and in
+ways that make the life we have known here fade into grey mists of
+insignificance. People "meet" a little, but very little, every social
+habit and convention has broken down, save with a few vulgarians and
+utter mistakers (mistakers, I mean, about the decency of things;) and
+for myself, I confess, I find there are very few persons I care to
+see--only those to whom and to whose state of feeling I am really
+attached. Promiscuous chatter on the public situation and the gossip
+thereanent of more or less wailing women in particular give unspeakably
+on my nerves. Depths of sacred silence seem to me to prescribe
+themselves in presence of the sanctities of action of those who, in
+unthinkable conditions almost, are magnificently _doing_ the thing. Then
+right and left are all the figures of mourning--though such proud erect
+ones--over the blow that has come to them. _There_ the women are
+admirable--the mothers and wives and sisters; the mothers in particular,
+since it's so much the younger lives, the fine seed of the future, that
+are offered and taken. The rate at which they are taken is
+appalling--but then I think of France and Russia and even of Germany
+herself, and the vision simply overwhelms and breaks the heart. "The
+German dead, the German dead!" I above all say to myself--in such
+hecatombs have _they_ been ruthlessly piled up by those who have driven
+them, from behind, to their fate; and it for the moment almost makes me
+forget Belgium--though when I _remember_ that disembowelled country my
+heart is at once hardened to _every_ son of a Hun. Belgium we have
+hugely and portentously with us; if never in the world was a nation so
+driven forth, so on the other hand was one never so taken to another's
+arms. And the Dutch have been nobly hospitable!...Immensely interesting
+what you say of the sublime newness of spirit of the great Russian
+people--of whom we are thinking here with the most confident admiration.
+I met a striking specimen the other day who was oddly enough in the
+Canadian contingent (he had been living two or three years in Canada and
+had volunteered there;) and who was of a stature, complexion,
+expression, and above all of a shining candour, which made him a kind of
+army-corps in himself.... But goodnight, dearest Hugh. I sit here
+writing late, in the now extraordinary London blackness of darkness and
+(almost) tension of stillness. The alarms we have had here as yet come
+to nothing. Please believe in the fond fidelity with which I think of
+you. Oh for the day of reparation and reunion! I hope for you that you
+_may_ have the great and terrible experience of Ambulance service at the
+front. Ah how I pray you also _may_ receive this benediction from your
+affectionate old
+
+/*
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+/#
+ Mr. Walter Berry had just passed through London on his way back to
+ Paris from a brief expedition to Berlin. The revived work which H.
+ J. was now carrying forward was _The Sense of the Past_.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+December 1st, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Edith,
+*/
+
+Walter offers me kindly to carry you my word, and I don't want him to go
+empty-handed, though verily only the poor shrunken sediment of me is
+practically left after the overwhelming and _ecrasant_ effect of
+listening to him on the subject of the transcendent high pitch of
+Berlin. I kick myself for being so flattened out by it, and ask myself
+moreover why I should feel it in any degree as a revelation, when it
+consists really of nothing but what one has been constantly saying to
+one's self--one's mind's eye perpetually blinking at it, as presumably
+the case--all these weeks and weeks. It's the personal note of testimony
+that has caused it to knock me up--what has permitted this being the
+nature and degree of my unspeakable and abysmal sensibility where "our
+cause" is concerned, and the fantastic force, the prodigious passion,
+with which my affections are engaged in it. They grow more and more
+so--and my soul is in the whole connection one huge sore ache. That
+makes me dodge lurid lights when I ought doubtless but personally to
+glare back at them--as under the effect of many of my impressions here I
+frequently do--or almost! For the moment I am quite floored--but I
+suppose I shall after a while pick myself up. I dare say, for that
+matter, that I am down pretty often--for I find I am constantly picking
+myself up. So even this time I don't really despair. About Belgium
+Walter was so admirably and unspeakably interesting--if the word be not
+mean for the scale of such tragedy--which you'll have from him all for
+yourself. If I don't call his Berlin simply interesting and have done
+with it, that's because the very faculty of attention is so overstrained
+by it as to hurt. This takes you all my love. I have got back to trying
+to work--on one of three books begun and abandoned--at the end of some
+"30,000 words"--15 years ago, and fished out of the depths of an old
+drawer at Lamb House (I sent Miss Bosanquet down to hunt it up) as
+perhaps offering a certain defiance of subject to the law by which most
+things now perish in the public blight. This does seem to kind of
+intrinsically resist--and I have hopes. But I must rally now before
+getting back to it. So pray for me that I do, and invite dear Walter to
+Kneel by my side and believe me your faithfully fond
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. T. S. Perry._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+December 11th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear and so sympathetic Lilla!
+*/
+
+I have been these many, by which I mean too many, days in receipt of
+your brave letter and impassioned sonnet--a combination that has done
+me, I assure you, no end of good. I so ache and yearn, here more or less
+on the spot, with the force of my interest in our public situation, I
+feel myself in short such a glowing and flaring firebrand, that I can't
+have enough of the blest article you supply, my standard of what
+constitutes enough being so high!... Your sonnet strikes me as very well
+made--which all sonnets from "female" pens are not; and since you invoke
+American association with us you do the fine thing in invoking it up to
+the hilt. Of course you can all do us most good by simply feeling and
+uttering as the best of you do--there having come in my way several
+copious pronouncements by the American Press than which it has seemed to
+me there could have been nothing better in the way of perfect
+understanding and happy expression. I have said to myself in presence of
+some of them "Oh blest and wondrous the miracle; the force of events,
+the light of our Cause, is absolutely inspiring the newspaper tone over
+there with the last thing one ever expected it to have, style and the
+weight of style; so that _all_ the good things are literally on our side
+at once!"
+
+It's delightful to me to hear of your local knitting and sewing
+circle--it quite goes to my heart in fact to catch your echo of the
+brave click of the needles at gentle Hancock! They click under my own
+mild roof from morning to night, so that I can't quite say why I don't
+find my soup flavoured with khaki wool or my napkin inadvertently
+replaced by a large grey sock. But the great thing is that it's really a
+pity you are not here for participation in the fine old English thrill
+and throb of all that goes forward simply from day to day and that makes
+the common texture of our life: you would generously abound in the sense
+of it, I feel, and be grateful for it as a kind of invaluable, a really
+cherishable, "race" experience. One wouldn't have to explain anything to
+you--you would take it all down in a gulp, the kind of gulp in which one
+has to indulge to keep from breaking down under the positive pang of
+comprehension and emotion. Two afternoons ago I caught that gulp, twice
+over, in the very act--while listening to that dear and affable Emile
+Boutroux make an exquisite philosophic address to the British Academy,
+which he had come over for the purpose of, and then hearing the less
+consummate, yet sturdily sensitive and expressive Lord Chancellor
+(Haldane) utter to him, in return, the thanks of the select and intense
+auditory and their sense of the beautiful and wonderful and
+unprecedented unison of nations that the occasion symbolised and
+celebrated. In the quietest way in the world Boutroux just escaped
+"breaking down" in his preliminary reference to what this meant and how
+he felt, and just so the good Haldane grazed the same almost inevitable
+accident in speaking for _us_, all us present and the whole public
+consciousness, when he addressed the lecturer afterwards. What was so
+moving was its being so utterly unrehearsed and immediate--its coming,
+on one side and the other, so of itself, and being a sort of thing that
+hasn't since God knows when, if ever, found itself taking place between
+nation and nation. I kind of wish that the U.S.A. were not (though of
+necessity, I admit) so absent from this feast of friendship; it figures
+for me as such an extraordinary luxury that the whirligig of time has
+turned up for us such an intimacy of association with France and that
+France so exquisitely responds to it. I quite tasted of the quality of
+this last fact two nights ago when an English officer, a most sane and
+acute middle-aged Colonel, dined with me and another friend, and gave us
+a real vision of what the presence of the British forces in the field
+now means for the so extraordinarily intelligent and responsive French,
+and what a really unprecedented relation (I do wish to goodness _we_
+were in it!) between a pair of fraternising and reciprocating people it
+represents. The truth is of course that the British participation has
+been extraordinarily, quite miraculously, effective and sustaining, has
+had in it a _quality_ of reinforcement out of proportion to its numbers,
+though these are steadily growing, and that all the intelligence of the
+wonderful France simply floods the case with appreciation and
+fraternity; these things shown in the charming way in which the French
+most of all _can_ show the like under full inspiration. Yes, it's an
+association that I do permit myself at wanton moments to wish that _we_,
+in our high worthiness to be of it, weren't so out of! But I mustn't, my
+dear Lilla, go maundering on. Intercede with Thomas to the effect of his
+writing me some thoroughly, some intensely and immensely participating
+word, for the further refreshment of my soul. It is refreshed here, as
+well as ravaged, oh at times so ravaged: by the general sense of what is
+maturing and multiplying, steadily multiplying, on behalf of the
+Allies--out of the immediate circle of whose effectively stored and
+steadily expanding energies we reach over to a slightly bedimmed but
+inexpressible Russia with a deep-felt sense that before we have all
+done with it together she is going somehow to emerge as the most
+interesting, the most original and the most potent of us all. Let Thomas
+take to himself from me that so I engage on behalf of his chosen people!
+Yours and his and the Daughter's all intimately and faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edmund Gosse._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+December 17th, 1914.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Gosse,
+*/
+
+This is a scratch of postscript to my note this evening posted to
+you--prompted by the consciousness of not having therein made a word of
+reply to your question as to what I "think of things." The recovered
+pressure of that question makes me somehow positively _want_ to say that
+(I think) I don't "think" of them at all--though I try to; that I only
+feel, and feel, and _toujours_ feel about them unspeakably, and about
+nothing else whatever--feeling so in Wordsworth's terms of exaltations,
+agonies and loves, and (our) unconquerable mind. Yes, I kind of make out
+withal that through our insistence an increasing purpose runs, and that
+one's vision of its final effect (though only with the aid of _time_)
+grows less and less dim, so that one seems to find at moments it's
+almost sharp! And meanwhile what a purely suicidal record for themselves
+the business of yesterday--the women and children (and babes in arms)
+slaughtered at Scarborough and Whitby, with their turning and fleeing as
+soon as ever they had killed enough for the moment. Oh, I do "think"
+enough to believe in retribution for _that_. So I've kind of answered
+you.
+
+/*
+Ever yours,
+
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Grace Norton._
+
+/#
+ This follows on the letter to Miss Norton of Oct. 16, 1914, dealing
+ with the work in France of her nephew, Richard Norton.
+#/
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+January 1st, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Grace!
+*/
+
+I waste no time in explaining again how reduced I am to the use of this
+machinery by the absolute physical effect on my poor old organism of the
+huge tension and oppression of our conditions here--to say nothing of
+the moral effect, with which the other is of course intensely mixed. I
+can tell you better thus moreover than by any weaker art what huge
+satisfaction I had yesterday in an hour or two of Richard's company; he
+having generously found time to lunch with me during two or three days
+that he is snatching away from the Front, under urgency of business. I
+gathered from him that you hear from him with a certain frequency and
+perhaps some fulness--I know it's always his desire that you shall; but
+even so you perhaps scarce take in how "perfectly splendid" he
+is--though even if you in a manner do I want to put it on record to you,
+for myself, that I find him unmitigatedly magnificent. It's impossible
+for me to overstate my impression of his intelligent force, his energy
+and lucidity, his gallantry and resolution, or of the success the
+unswerving application of these things is making for him and for his
+enterprise. Not that I should speak as if he and that were different
+matters--he is the enterprise, and that, on its side, is his very self;
+and in fine it is a tremendous tonic--among a good many tonics that we
+have indeed, thank goodness!--to get the sense of his richly beneficent
+activity. He seemed extremely well and "fit," and suffered me to ply him
+with all the questions that one's constant longing here for a nearer
+view, combined with a kind of shrinking terror of it, given all the
+misery the greatest nearness seems to reveal, makes one restlessly keep
+up. What he has probably told you, with emphasis, by letter, is the
+generalisation most sadly forced upon him--the comparative
+supportability of the fact of the wounded and the sick beside the
+desolating view of the ravaged refugees. He can help the former much
+more than the latter, and the ability to do his special job with success
+is more or less sustaining and rewarding; but the sight of the wretched
+people with their villages and homes and resources utterly annihilated,
+and they simply staring at the blackness of their ruin, with the very
+clothes on their backs scarce left to them, is clearly something that
+would quite break the heart if one could afford to let it. If he isn't
+able to give you the detail of much of _that_ tragedy, so much the
+better for you--save indeed for your thereby losing too some examples of
+how he succeeds in occasional mitigations _quand meme_, thanks to the
+positive, the quite blest, ferocity of his passion not to fail of any
+service he can with the least conceivability render. He was most
+interesting, he was altogether admirable, as to his attitude in the
+matter of going _outside_ of the strict job of carrying the military
+sick and wounded, and them only, as the ancient "Geneva Conventions"
+confine a Red Cross Ambulance to doing. There has been some perfunctory
+protest, not long since, on the part of some blank agent of that (Red
+Cross) body, in relation to his picking up stricken and helpless
+civilians and seeing them as far as possible on their way to some
+desperate refuge or relief; whereupon he had given this critic full in
+the face the whole philosophy of his proceedings and intentions,
+letting the personage know that when the Germans ruthlessly broke every
+Geneva Convention by attempting to shell him and his cars and his
+wounded whenever they could spy a chance, he was absolutely for doing in
+mercy and assistance what they do in their dire brutality, and might be
+depended upon to convey not only every suffering civilian but any armed
+and trudging soldiers whom a blest chance might offer him. His
+remonstrant visitor remained blank and speechless, but at the same time
+duly impressed or even floored, and Dick will have, I think, so far as
+any further or more serious protest is concerned, an absolutely free
+hand. The Germans have violated with the last cynicism both the letter
+and the spirit of every agreement they ever signed, and it's little
+enough that the poor retaliation left us, not that "in kind," which I
+think we may describe ourselves as despising, but that in mere
+reparation of their ravage and mere scrappy aid to ourselves, should be
+compassed by us when we _can_ compass it.... Richard told me yesterday
+that the aspect of London struck him as having undergone a great change
+since his last rush over--in the sense of the greater flagrancy of the
+pressure of the War; and one feels that perfectly on the spot and
+without having to go away and come back for it. There corresponds with
+it doubtless a much tighter screw-up of the whole public consciousness,
+worked upon by all kinds of phenomena that are very penetrating here,
+but that doubtless are reduced to some vagueness as reported to you
+across the sea--when reported at all, as most of them can't be. Goodbye
+at any rate for this hour. What I most wanted to give you was the strong
+side-wind and conveyed virtue of Dick's visit. I hope you are seeing
+rather more than less of Alice and Peggy, to whom I succeed in writing
+pretty often--and perhaps things that if repeated to you, as I trust
+they sometimes are, help you to some patient allowance for your
+tremendously attached old friend,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Dacre Vincent._
+
+/#
+ This refers to the loss of a fine old mulberry-tree that had stood
+ on the lawn at Lamb House.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+January 6th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Margaret,
+*/
+
+It has been delightful to me to hear from you even on so sorry a subject
+as my poor old prostrated tree; which it was most kind of you to go and
+take a pitying look at. He might have gone on for some time, I think, in
+the absence of an _inordinate_ gale--but once the fury of the tempest
+really descended he was bound to give way, because his poor old heart
+was dead, his immense old trunk hollow. He had no power to resist left
+when the south-wester caught him by his vast _criniere_ and simply
+twisted his head round and round. It's very sad, for he was the making
+of the garden--he was _it_ in person; and now I feel for the time as if
+I didn't care what becomes of it--my interest wholly collapses. But what
+a folly to talk of _that_ prostration, among all the prostrations that
+surround us! One hears of them here on every side--and they represent
+(of course I am speaking of the innumerable splendid young men, fallen
+in their flower) the crushingly black side of all the horrible business,
+the irreparable dead loss of what is most precious, the inestimable seed
+of the future. The air is full of the sense of all _that_
+dreadfulness--the echoes forever in one's ears. Still, I haven't wanted
+to wail to you--and don't write you for that. London isn't cheerful, but
+vast and dark and damp and very visibly _depleted_ (as well may be!) and
+yet is also in a sense uplifting and reassuring, such an impression does
+one get here after all of the enormous resources of this empire. I mean
+that the _reminders_ at every turn are so great. I see a few
+people--quite as many as I can do with; for I find I can't do with
+miscellaneous chatter or make a single new acquaintance--look at a
+solitary new face save that of the wounded soldiers in hospital, whom I
+see something of and find of a great and touching interest. Yet the
+general conditions of town I find the only ones I can do with now, and I
+am more glad than I can say to think of Mrs. Lloyd and her daughters
+supplanting me, at their ease, at dear old L.H. I rejoice to hear from
+you of Beau's fine outlook and I send him my aged blessing--as I do to
+his Father, who must take good comfort of him. I am afraid on the other
+hand that all these diluvian and otherwise devastated days haven't
+contributed to the gaiety (I won't say of "nations"--what will have
+become, forever, of that? but) of golfers pure and simple. I wonder
+about you much, and very tenderly, and wish you weren't so far, or my
+agility so extinct. I find I think with dismay--positive terror--of a
+station or a train--more than once or twice a year. Bitter moreover the
+thought to me that you never seem now in the way of coming up....
+
+Goodnight, dear Margaret. Yours all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To the Hon. Evan Charteris._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+Jan. 22, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Evan,
+*/
+
+I am more deeply moved than I can say by the receipt of your so
+admirably vivid and interesting letter.... I envy you intensely your
+opportunity to apply _that_ [spirit of observation] in these immense
+historic conditions and thus to have had a hand of your own in the most
+prodigious affirmation of the energy and ingenuity of man ("however
+misplaced"!) that surely can ever have been in the world. For God's sake
+go on taking as many notes of it as you possibly can, and believe with
+what grateful piety I shall want to go over your treasure with you when
+you finally bring it home. Such impressions as you must get, such
+incalculable things as you must see, such unutterable ones as you must
+feel! Well, keep it all up, and above all keep up that same blest
+confidence in my fond appreciation. Wonderful your account of that night
+visit to the trenches and giving me more of the sense and the smell and
+the fantastic grimness, the general ordered and methodised horror, than
+anything else whatever that has pretended to enlighten us. With infinite
+interest do I take in what you say of the rapidity with which the
+inside-out-ness of your conditions becomes the matter of course and the
+platitudinous--which I take partly to result from the tremendous
+collectivity of the case, doesn't it? the fact of the wholeness of the
+stress and strain or intimate fusion, as in a common pot, of all
+exposures, all resistances, all the queerness and all the muchness! But
+I mustn't seem to put too interrogatively my poor groping speculations.
+Only wait to correct my mistakes in some better future, and I shall
+understand you down to the ground. We add day to day here as
+consciously, or labouringly, as you are doing, no doubt, on your
+side--it's in fact like lifting every 24 hours, just now, a very
+dismally dead weight and setting it on top of a pile of such others,
+already stacked, which promises endlessly to grow--so that the mere
+reaching up adds all the while to the beastly effort. London is
+_grey_--in moral tone; and even the Zeppelin bombs of last night at
+Yarmouth do little to make it flush. What a pitiful horror indeed must
+that Ypres desolation and desecration be--a baseness of demonism. I
+find, thank God, that under your image of that I at least _can_ flush.
+It so happens that I dine to-morrow (23d) with John Sargent, or rather I
+mean lunch, and I shall take for granted your leave to read him your
+letter. I bless you again for it, and am yours all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Compton Mackenzie._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+January 23rd, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Monty,
+*/
+
+I am acknowledging your so interesting letter at once; because I find
+that under the effect of all our conditions here I can't answer for any
+postal fluency, however reduced in quality or quantity, at an indefinite
+future time. My fluency of the moment even, such as it is, has to take
+the present mechanic form; but here goes, at any rate, to the extent of
+my having rejoiced to hear from you, not of much brightness though your
+news may be. I tenderly condole and participate with you on your having
+been again flung into bed. Truly the haul on your courage has to keep on
+being enormous--and I applaud to the echo the wonderful way that virtue
+in you appears to meet it. You strike me as leading verily the heroic
+life at a pitch nowhere and by nobody surpassed--even though our whole
+scene bristles all over with such grand examples of it. Since you are up
+and at work again may that at least go bravely on--while I marvel again,
+according to my wont, at your still finding it possible in conditions
+that I fear would be for me dismally "inhibitive." I bless your new
+book, even if you didn't in our last talk leave me with much grasp of
+what it is to be "about." In presence of any suchlike intention I find I
+want a subject to be able quite definitely to state and declare
+itself--_as_ a subject; and when the thing is communicated to me (in
+advance) in the form of So-and-So's doing this, that or the other, or
+Something-else's "happening" and so on, I kind of yearn for the
+expressible idea or motive, what the thing is to be done _for_, to have
+been presented to me; which you may say perhaps is asking a good deal. I
+don't think so, if any cognisance at all is vouchsafed one; it is the
+only thing I in the least care to ask. What the author shall do with his
+idea I am quite ready to wait for, but am meanwhile in no relation to
+the work at all unless that basis has been provided. Console yourself,
+however: dear great George Meredith once began to express to me what a
+novel he had just started ("One of Our Conquerors") was to be about by
+no other art than by simply naming to me the half-dozen occurrences,
+such as they were, that occupied the pages he had already written; so
+that I remained, I felt, quite without an answer to my respectful
+inquiry--which he had all the time the very attitude of kindly
+encouraging and rewarding!
+
+But why do I make these restrictive and invidious observations? I bless
+your book, and the author's fine hand and brain, whatever it may consist
+of; and I bend with interest over your remarks about poor speculating
+and squirming Italy's desperate dilemma. The infusion of that further
+horror of local devastation and anguish is too sickening for words--I
+have been able only to avert my face from it; as, if I were nearer, I
+fear I should but wrap my head in my mantle and give up altogether. The
+truth is however that the Italian case affects me as on the whole rather
+_ugly_--failing to see, as one does, their _casus belli_, and having to
+see, as one also does, that they must hunt up one to give them any sort
+of countenance at all. I should--
+
+
+_January 25th._
+
+I had alas to break off two days ago, having been at that very moment
+flung into bed, as I am occasionally liable to [be], somewhat like
+yourself; though happily not in the prolonged way. I am up this morning
+again--though still in rather semi-sickly fashion; but trying to collect
+my wits afresh as to what I was going to say about Italy. However, I had
+perhaps better not say it--as I take, I rather fear, a more detached
+view of her attitude than I see that, on the spot, you can easily do. By
+which I mean that I don't much make out how, as regards the two nations
+with whom [she is in] alliance (originally so unnatural, alas, in the
+matter of Austria!), she can act in a fashion, any fashion, regardable
+as _straight_. I always hated her patching up a friendly relation with
+Austria, and thereby with Germany, as against France and this country;
+and now what she publishes is that it _was_ good enough for her so long
+as there was nothing to be got otherwise. If there's anything to be got
+(by any _other_ alliance) she will go in for that; but she thus gives
+herself away, as to all her recent past, a bit painfully, doesn't one
+feel?--and will do so especially if what she has in mind is to cut in
+on Turkey and so get ahead, for benefit or booty or whatever, of her
+very own allies. However, I mustn't speak as if we and ours shouldn't be
+glad of her help, whatever that help is susceptible of amounting to. The
+situation is one for not looking a gift-horse in the mouth--which only
+proves, alas, how _many_ hideous and horrible [aspects] such situations
+have. Personally, I don't see how she can make up her mind not, in spite
+of all temptations, to remain as still as a mouse. Isn't it rather
+luridly borne in upon her that the Germans have only to make up their
+minds ruthlessly to violate Switzerland in order, as they say, "to be at
+Milan, by the Simplon, the St. Gotthard or whatever, in just ten hours"?
+Ugh!--let me not talk of such abominations: I don't know why I pretend
+to it or attempt it. I too am trying (I don't know whether I told you)
+to bury my nose in the doing of something daily; and am finding that,
+however little I manage on any given occasion, even that little sustains
+and inflames and rewards me. I lose myself thus in the mystery of what
+"art" can do for one, even with every blest thing against it. And why it
+_should_ and how it does and what it means--that is "the funny thing"!
+However, as I just said, one mustn't look a gift-horse etc. So don't
+yourself so scrutinise _this_ poor animal, but believe me yours all
+faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Miss Elizabeth Norton._
+
+/#
+ The "pamphlet" was his appeal on behalf of the American Volunteer
+ Motor-Ambulance, included in _Within the Rim_.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+Jan. 25th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Lily,
+*/
+
+It has been of the greatest interest, it has been delightful, to me to
+receive to-night your so generous and informing letter. The poor little
+pamphlet for which you "thank" me is a helpless and empty thing--for
+which I should blush were not the condition of its production so legibly
+stamped upon it. You can't say things unless you have been out there to
+learn them, and _if_ you have been out there to learn them you can say
+them less than ever. With all but utterly nothing to go upon I had to
+make my remarks practically _of_ nothing, and that the effect of them
+can only be nil on a subscribing public which wants constant and
+particular news of the undertakings it has been asked to believe in once
+for all, I can but too readily believe. The case seems different here--I
+mean on this side of the sea--where scores and scores of such like corps
+are in operation in France--the number of ambulance-cars is many, many
+thousand, on all the long line--without its becoming necessary for them
+that their work should be publicly chronicled. I think the greater
+nearness--here--the strange and sinister nearness--makes much of the
+difference; various facts are conveyed by personal--unpublished--report,
+and these sufficiently serve the purpose. What seems clear, at all
+events, is that there _is_ no devisable means for keeping the enterprise
+in touch with American sympathy, and I sadly note therefore what you
+tell me of the inevitable and not distant end. The aid rendered strikes
+me as having been of the handsomest--as is splendidly the case with all
+the aid America is rendering, in her own large-handed and full-handed
+way; of which you tell me such fine interesting things from your own
+experience. It makes you all seem one vast and prodigious workshop
+_with_ us--for the resources and the energy of production and creation
+and devotion here are of course beyond estimation. I imagine indeed
+that, given your more limited relation to the War, your resources in
+money are more remarkable--even though here (by which I mean in England,
+for the whole case is I believe more hampered in France) the way the
+myriad calls and demands are endlessly met and met is prodigious enough.
+It does my heart good that you should express yourself as you do--though
+how could you do anything else?--on behalf of the simply sacred cause,
+as I feel it, of the Allies; for here at least one needs to feel it so
+to bear up under the close pressure of all that is so hideous and
+horrible in what has been let loose upon us. Much of the time one feels
+that one simply can't--the heart-breaking aspect, the destruction of
+such masses, on such a scale, of the magnificent young life that was to
+have been productive and prolific, bears down any faith, any patience,
+all argument and all hope. I can look at the woe of the bereft, the
+parents, the mothers and wives, and take it comparatively for
+granted--that is not care for what they individually suffer (as they
+seem indifferent themselves, both here and in France, in an
+extraordinarily noble way.) But the dead loss of such ranks upon ranks
+of the finest young human material--of life--that is an abyss into which
+one can simply gaze appalled. And as if that were not enough I find
+myself sickened to the very soul by the apparent _sense_ of the _louche_
+and sinister figure of Mr. Woodrow Wilson, who seems to be _aware_ of
+nothing but the various ingenious ways in which it is open to him to
+make difficulties for us. I may not read him right, but most of my
+correspondents at home appear to, and they minister to my dread of him
+and the meanness of his note as it breaks into all this heroic air.
+
+But I am writing you in the key of _mere_ lamentation--which I didn't
+mean to do. Strange as it may seem, there are times when I am much
+uplifted--when what _may_ come out of it all seems almost worth it. And
+then the black nightmare holds the field again--and in fact one proceeds
+almost wholly by those restless alternations. They consume one's vital
+substance, but one will perhaps wear them out first. It touches me
+deeply that you should speak tenderly of dear old London, for which my
+own affection in these months _s'est accrue_ a thousandfold--just as the
+same has taken place in my attachment for all these so very
+preponderantly decent and solid people. The race _is_ worth fighting
+for, immensely--in fact I don't know any other for whom it can so much
+be said.... Well, go on working and feeling and believing for me, dear
+Lily, and God uphold your right arm and carry far your voice. Think of
+me too as your poor old aching and yet not altogether collapsing, your
+in fact quite clinging,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Hugh Walpole._
+
+/#
+ Mr. Walpole was now serving with the Red Cross on the Russian
+ front.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+February 14th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Hugh,
+*/
+
+"When you write," you say, and when _do_ I write but just exactly an
+hour after your letter of this evening, that of February 1st, a
+fortnight ago to a day, has come to hand? I delight in having got it,
+and find it no less interesting than genial--bristling with fine
+realities. Much as it tells me, indeed, I could have done with still
+more; but that is of course always the case at such a time as this, and
+amid such wonderments and yearnings; and I make gratefully the most of
+what there is. The basis, the connection, the mode of employment on, and
+in, and under which you "go off," for instance, are matters that leave
+me scratching my head and exhaling long and sad sighs--but as those two
+things are what I am at in these days most of my time I don't bring them
+home _most_ criminally to you. Only I am moved to beseech you this time
+not to throw yourself into the thick of military operations amid which
+your want of even the minimum of proper eyesight apparently may devote
+you to destruction, more or less--after the manner of the blind _quart
+d'heure_ described to me in your letter previous to this one. I am sorry
+the black homesickness so feeds upon you amid your terrific paradoxical
+friends, the sport alike of their bodies and their souls, of whom your
+account is admirably vivid; but I well conceive your state, which has my
+tenderest sympathy--that nostalgic ache at its worst being the
+invocation of the very devil of devils. Don't let it break the spell of
+your purpose of learning Russian, of really mastering it--though even
+while I say this I rather wince at your telling me that you incline not
+to return to England till September next. I don't put that regret on the
+score of my loss of the sight of you till then--that gives the sort of
+personal turn to the matter that we are all ashamed together of giving
+to any matter now. But the being and the having been in England--or in
+France, which is now so much the same thing--during at least a part of
+this unspeakable year affects me as something you are not unlikely to be
+sorry to have missed; there attaches to it--to the being here--something
+so sovereign and so initiatory in the way of a British experience. I
+mean that it's as if you wouldn't have had the full general British
+experience without it, and that this may be a pity for you as a painter
+of British phenomena--for I don't suppose you think of reproducing
+_only_ Russian for the rest of your shining days. However, I hasten to
+add that I feel the very greatest aversion to intermeddlingly advising
+you--your completing your year in Russia all depends on what you _do_
+with the precious time. You may bring home fruits by which you will be
+wholly justified. Address yourself indeed to doing that and putting it
+absolutely through--and I will, for my part, back you up unlimitedly.
+Only, bring your sheaves with you, and gather in a golden bundle of the
+same. I detest, myself, the fine old British horror--as it has
+flourished at least up to now, when in respect to the great matter
+that's upon us the fashion has so much changed--of doing anything
+consistently and seriously. So if you should draw out your absence I
+shall believe in your reasons. Meanwhile I am myself of the most flaming
+British complexion--the whole thing is to me an unspeakably intimate
+experience--if it isn't abject to apply such a term when one hasn't had
+one's precious _person_ straight up against the facts. I have only had
+my poor old mind and imagination--but as one _can_ have them here; and I
+live partly in dark abysses and partly in high and, I think, noble
+elations. But how, at my age and in my conditions, I could have
+beautifully done without it! I resist more or less--since you ask me to
+tell you how I "am"; I resist and go on from day to day because I want
+to and the horrible interest is too great not to. But that same is
+adding the years in great shovel-fulls to our poor old lives (those at
+least of my generation:) so don't be too long away after all if you want
+ever to see me again. I have in a manner got back to work--after a black
+interregnum; and find it a refuge and a prop--but the conditions make it
+difficult, exceedingly, almost insuperably, _I_ find, in a sense far
+other than the mere distressing and depressing. The subject-matter of
+one's effort has become _itself_ utterly treacherous and false--its
+relation to reality utterly given away and smashed. Reality is a world
+that was to be capable of _this_--and how represent that horrific
+capability, _historically_ latent, historically ahead of it? How on the
+other hand _not_ represent it either--without putting into play mere
+fiddlesticks?
+
+I had to break off my letter last night from excess of lateness, and now
+I see I misdated it. Tonight is the 15th, the p.m. of a cold grey Sunday
+such as we find wintry here, in our innocence of your ferocities of
+climate; to which in your place I should speedily succumb. That buried
+beneath the polar blizzard and the howling homesick snowdrift you
+_don't_ utterly give way is, I think, a proof of very superior resources
+and of your being reserved for a big future.... Goodnight, however, now
+really, dearest Hugh. I follow your adventure with all the affectionate
+solicitude of your all-faithful old
+
+/*
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+February 16th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Mrs. Lodge,
+*/
+
+It is indeed very horrible that having had the kindest of little letters
+from you ever so long ago (I won't remind you how long--you may have
+magnanimously forgotten it a little) I am thanking you for it only at
+this late day. Explanations are vain things, and yet if I throw myself
+on the biggest explanation that ever was in the world there may be
+something in it.... Fortunately the interest and the sympathy grow (if
+things that start at the superlative degree _can_ grow), and I never am
+sick with all the monstrosity of it but I become after a bit almost well
+with all the virtue and the decency. I try to live in the admiring
+contemplation of that as much as possible--and I thought I already knew
+how deeply attached I am to this remarkable country and to the character
+of its people. I find I haven't known until now the real degree of my
+attachment--which I try to show--that is to apply--the intensity of in
+small and futile ways. To-day for instance I have been taking to my
+dentist a convalesced soldier--a mere sapper of the R.E.--whom I fished
+out of a hospital; yesterday I went to the Stores to send
+"food-chocolate" to my cook's nephew at the front, Driver Bisset of the
+Artillery; and at the moment I write I am putting up for the night a
+young ex-postman from Rye who has come up to pass the doctor tomorrow
+for the Naval Brigade. These things, as I write them, make me almost
+feel that I do push before you the inevitability of my silence. But they
+don't mean, please, that I am not living very intensively, at the same
+time, with you all at Washington--where I fondly suppose you all to
+entertain sentiments, the Senator and yourself, Constance and that
+admirable Gussy, into which I may enter with the last freedom. I won't
+go into the particulars of my sympathy--or at least into the particulars
+of what it imputes to you: but I have a general sweet confidence, a kind
+of wealth of divination.
+
+London is of course not gay (thank the Lord;) but I wouldn't for the
+world not be here--there are impressions under which I feel it a kind of
+uplifting privilege. The situation doesn't make me gregarious--but on
+the contrary very fastidious about the people I care to see. I know
+exactly those I don't, but never have I taken more kindly to those I
+do--and with _them_ intercourse has a fine intimacy that is beyond
+anything of the past. But we are very mature--and that is part of the
+harmony--the young and the youngish are _all_ away getting killed, so
+far as they are males; and so far as they are females, wives and
+fiancees and sisters, they are occupied with being simply beyond praise.
+The mothers are pure Roman and it's all tremendously becoming to every
+one. There are really no fiancees by the way--the young men get home for
+three days and are married--then off into the absolute Hell of it again.
+But good-night now. It was truly exquisite of you to write to me. Do
+feel, and tell Cabot that I take the liberty of asking _him_ to feel,
+how thoroughly I count on all your house. It's a luxury for me to _know_
+how I can on Constance. Yours, dear Mrs. Lodge, ever and ever so
+faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. William James._
+
+/#
+ H. J.'s eldest nephew was at this time occupied with relief work in
+ Belgium.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+Feb. 20th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Alice,
+*/
+
+...Of course our great (family) public fact is Harry's continuously
+inscrutable and unseizable activity here. "Here" I say, without knowing
+in the least where he now is--and the torment of his spending all this
+time on this side of the sea, and of one's utter loss of him in
+_consequence_, is really quite dreadful.... England is splendid,
+undisturbed and undismayed by the savage fury and the roaring mad-bull
+"policy" of Germany's mine-and-torpedo practice against all the nations
+of the earth, or rather of the sea--though of course there will be a
+certain number of disasters, and it will probably be on neutrals that
+most of these will fall.
+
+Feb. 22nd, p.m. I had to break this off two nights ago and since then
+that remark has been signally confirmed--three neutral ships have been
+sunk by mines and torpedoes, and one of these we learn this a.m. is an
+American cargo-boat. I don't suppose anything particular will "happen"
+for you all with Germany because of this incident alone (the crew were
+saved;) yet it can hardly improve relations, and she is sure to repeat
+the injury in some form, promptly, and then the fat will be on the fire.
+Mr. Roosevelt is far from being dear to me, but I can't _not_ agree with
+his contention that the U.S.'s sitting down in meekness and silence
+under the German repudiation of every engagement she solemnly took with
+us, as the initiatory power in the Hague convention, constitutes an
+unspeakable precedent, and makes us a deplorable figure.
+
+Meanwhile I find it a real uplifting privilege to live in an air so
+unterrorized as that of this country, and to feel what confidence we
+insuperably feel in the big _sea-genius_, let alone the huge
+sea-resources, of this people. It is a great experience. I mean the
+whole process of life here is now--even if it does so abound in tragedy
+and pity, such as one can often scarcely face. But there is too much of
+all that to say--and all I intended was to remark that while Germany
+roars and runs amuck the new armies now at last ready are being oh so
+quietly transported across the diabolised Channel. The quiet and the
+steady going here, amid the German vociferation, is of itself an
+enormous--I was going to say pleasure. We have just heard from Burgess
+of the arrival of his regiment at Havre--they left the Tower of London
+but a few days ago.... I go to-morrow to the Protheros to help them with
+tea-ing a party of convalescent soldiers from hospital--Mrs. J. G.
+Butcher, like thousands, or at least hundreds, of other people, sends
+her car on certain afternoons of the week to different hospitals for
+four of the bettering patients--or as many as will go into it--and they
+are conveyed either to her house or to some other arranged with. I have
+"met" sets of them thus several times--the "right people" are wanted for
+them, and nothing can be more interesting and admirable and verily
+charming than I mostly find them. The last time the Protheros had, by
+Mrs. Butcher's car, wounded Belgians--but to-morrow it is to be British,
+whom I on the whole prefer, though the Belgians are more _gravely_
+pathetic. The difficulty about them is that they are so apt to know only
+Flemish and understand almost no French--save as one of them, always
+included for the purpose, can interpret. I had to-day to luncheon a
+most decent and appreciative little sapper in the Engineers, whom I
+originally found in hospital and whose teeth I have been having done up
+for him--at very reduced military rates! There is nothing one isn't
+eager to do for them, and their gratitude for small mercies, excellent
+stuff as they are, almost wrings the heart. _This_ obscure hero (a great
+athlete in the _running_ line) is completely well again and goes in a
+day or two back to the Front; but oh how they don't like the hellishness
+of it (_that_ is beyond all conception,) and oh how they don't let this
+make any difference! Tremendously will the "people" by this war--I mean
+by their patience of it and in it--have made good their place in the
+sun; though even as one says that one recognizes still more how the
+"upper classes" in this country and the others have poured themselves
+unstintedly out. The way "society" at large, in England, has
+magnificently played up, will have given it, I think it will be found, a
+new lease of life. However, society, in wars, always does play up--and
+it is by them, and for them, that the same are mostly made....
+
+Feb. 23rd. Again I had to go to bed, but it's all right and my letter
+wouldn't in any case have gone to you till to-morrow's New York post.
+Meanwhile not much has happened, thank heaven, save that I went to tea
+with little Fanny P. and her five convalescents, and that it was a very
+successful affair.... We plied them with edibles and torrents of the
+drinkable and they expanded, as always, and became interesting and
+moving, in the warmth of civilization and sympathy. Those I had on
+either side of me at table were men of the old Army--I mean who had been
+through the Boer War, and were therefore nigh upon forty, and
+proportionately more _soldatesques_; but there is nothing, ever, that
+one wouldn't do for any one of them; they become at once such children
+of history, such creatures of distinction....
+
+/*
+Ever your affectionate
+
+HENRY.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+/#
+ Mrs. Wharton, writing to describe a journey she had made along part
+ of the French front, had mentioned that a staff-officer at Ste.
+ Menehould had read some of her books, and had shown his
+ appreciation by facilitating her visit to Verdun.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+March 5th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Edith,
+*/
+
+How can I welcome and applaud enough your splendid thrilling letter--in
+which, though it gives me your whole spectacle and impression as
+unspeakably portentous, I find you somehow of the very same heroic
+_taille_ of whatever it was that gave the rest at the monstrous maximum.
+I unutterably envy you these sights and suffered assaults of the
+_maxima_--condemned as I am by doddering age and "mean" infirmity to the
+poor mesquins _minima_, when really to find myself in closer touch would
+so fearfully interest and inspire and overwhelm me (as one wants to be
+overwhelmed.) However, since my ignoble portion is what it is, the next
+best thing is to heap you on the altar of sacrifice and gloat over
+_your_ overwhelmedness and demand of you to serve me still more and more
+of it. On this I even insist now that I have tasted of your state and
+your substance--for your impression is rendered in a degree so vivid and
+touching that it all (especially those vespers in the church with the
+tragic beds in the aisles) wrings tears from my aged eyes. What a hungry
+_luxury_ to be able to come back with things and give them then and
+there straight into the aching voids: do it, _do_ it, my blest Edith,
+for all you're worth: rather, rather--"sauvez, sauvez la France!" Ah, je
+la sauverais bien, moi, if I hadn't been ruined myself too soon!... Ce
+que c'est for you, evidently, to find yourself in these adventures, like
+Ouida, "the favourite reading of the military." Well, as I say, do keep
+in touch with your public! I stupidly forgot to tell Frederick to tell
+you not to dream of returning me those L6. 0. 0 (all he would take,) but
+to regard them as the contribution I was really then in the very nick of
+sending to your Belges! So I _wired_ you a day or two ago to that
+effect, after too much wool-gathering, and to anticipate absolutely any
+restitution. It made it so _easy_ a sending. Well then a bientot--Oliver
+shamelessly (not asks, but) _howls_ for more. Yours all devotedlier than
+ever,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To the Hon. Evan Charteris._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+March 13th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Evan,
+*/
+
+Your letter is of such interest and beauty that I must thank you for it,
+at once. Little idea can you have of how the sense of your whereabouts,
+your visions, impressions and contacts, thrills me and makes me wonder,
+enriches and excites my poor little private life.... In short you affect
+me as gulping down great mugfuls of experience, while I am sipping that
+compound out of a liqueur-glass not a quarter full. The only thing I can
+say to myself is that I can live too, thank God, by my friends'
+experience, when I hang about them in imagination, as you must take it
+from me that I do about you. You help me greatly to do so with your
+account of the soupless return of hospitality to your kind French
+harbourers that you had been bringing-off--and this in particular by
+your mention of the admirable aspects they, and all who around you are
+like them, present to your intelligent English eyes. I rejoice in all
+expressions and testimonies about the French, wonderful and genial race;
+all generous appreciation of the way they are carrying themselves now
+seems to me of the highest international value and importance, and,
+frankly, I wish more of that found its way into our newspapers here, so
+prodigiously (even if erratically) copious about our own doings. We
+ought to commend and commemorate and celebrate them--our Allies'
+doings--more publicly and explicitly--but the want of imagination
+hereabouts (save as to that of--to the report of--grand things that
+haven't happened) is often almost a painful impression. I find myself
+really wondering whether people can do without it, succeed without it,
+as much as that! One meets constant examples of a sort of unpenetrated
+state which disconcert and rather alarm. However, these remarks are but
+the fruit of the fact that something stirs in me ever so deeply and
+gratefully, almost to the point of a pang, at all rendering of justice
+and homage to the children of France! Go on being charming and
+responsive to them--it will do _us_ good as well as do them. I am sure
+their (your particular guests') enjoyment of your agitated dinner was
+exquisite.
+
+Very interesting, not less, your picture of the blest irreflection and
+absence of morbid analysis in which you are living--in face of all the
+possibilities; and wondrous enough surely must be all the changes and
+lapses of importance and value, of sensibility itself, the difference of
+your relation to things and the drop out of some relations
+altogether.... But I catch in your remarks the silver thread of
+optimism, not bulging out but subtly gleaming, and it gives me no end of
+satisfaction. A few gleams have lately been coming to me otherwise, and
+the action of Neuve Chapelle (if I may rashly name it,) which we have
+reports of in the papers, is I suppose the one you speak of as cheering.
+The great thing we do in London, however, is to strain our ears for the
+thunder of the Dardanelles, which we even feel that we get pretty
+straight and pretty strong, and in which we see consequences the most
+tremendous, verily beyond all present utterance. Nothing in all the war
+has made me hang on it in such suspense--though we venture even almost
+to presume. I see few people--and _try_ to see only those I positively
+want to; whom, par exemple, I value the exchange of earnest remarks with
+more than ever. But I am ill-conditioned for "telling" you things--and
+indeed I should think meanly of London if there _was_ very much to tell.
+A few nights ago I dined with Mervyn O'Gorman, my rather near neighbour
+here, and met a youngish and exceedingly interesting, in fact charming,
+Colonel Brancker, just back from the front--both of which high
+aeronautic experts you probably know. I mention them because I extracted
+from them so intense a thrill--drawing them out--for they let me--on the
+subject of the so more and more revealed affinity of the British
+temperament with that of the conquering airman--and thereby of the
+extent to which the military, or the energetic, future of this country
+may be in the air. They put it so splendidly that I went home
+unspeakably rejoicing (it may "mean" so much!) and as if myself
+ponderously soaring. But what am I ridiculously remarking to _you_? The
+great point I wish to make is the lively welcome I shall give you in
+April--thank you for that knowledge; and that I am all-faithfully yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+
+March 23rd, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+Chere Madame et Confrere,
+*/
+
+Don't imagine for a moment that I don't feel the full horror of my
+having had to wait till now, when I can avail myself of this aid, to
+acknowledge, as the poor pale pettifogging term has it, the receipt from
+you of inexpressibly splendid bounties. I won't attempt to explain or
+expatiate--about this abject failure of utterance: the idea of
+"explaining" anything to _you_ in these days, or of any expatiation that
+isn't exclusively that of your own genius upon your own adventures and
+impressions! I think _the_ reason why I have been so baffled, in a word,
+is that all my powers of being anything else have gone to living upon
+your two magnificent letters, the one from Verdun, and the one after
+your second visit there; which gave me matter of experience and
+appropriation to which I have done the fullest honour. Your whole record
+is sublime, and the interest and the beauty and the terror of it all
+have again and again called me back to it. I have ventured to share it,
+for the good of the cause and the glory of the connection (mine,) with
+two or three select others--this I candidly confess to you--one of whom
+was dear Howard, absolutely as dear as ever through everything, and whom
+I all but reduced to floods of tears, tears of understanding and
+sympathy. I know them at last, your incomparable pages, by heart--and
+thus it is really that I feel qualified to speak to you of them. With
+the two sublimities in question, or between them, came of course also
+the couple of other favours, enclosing me, pressing back upon me, my
+attempted contribution to your Paris labour: to which perversity I have
+had to bow my head. I was very sorry to be so forced, but even while
+cursing and gnashing my teeth I got your post-office order cashed, and
+the money _is_, God knows, assistingly spendable here! Another pang was
+your mention of Jean du Breuil's death.... I didn't know him, had never
+seen him; but your account of the admirable manner of his end makes one
+feel that one would like even to have just beheld him. We are in the
+midst, the very midst, of histories of that sort, miserable and
+terrible, here too; the Neuve Chapelle business, from a strange, in the
+sense of being a pretty false, glamour at first flung about which we are
+gradually recovering, seems to have taken a hideous toll of officers,
+and other distressing legends (legends of mistake and confusion) are
+somehow overgrowing it too. But painful particulars are not what I want
+to give you--of anything; you are up to your neck in your own, and I had
+much rather pick my steps to the clear places, so far as there be any
+such! I continue to try and keep my own existence one, so far as I
+may--a place clear of the last accablement, I mean: apparently what it
+comes to is that it's "full up" with the last but one.
+
+_Wednesday, 24th._ I had to break this off yesterday--and it was time,
+apparently, with the rather dreary note I was sounding: though I don't
+know that I have a very larky one to go on with to-day--save so far as
+the taking of the big Austrian fortress, which I can neither write nor
+pronounce, makes one a little soar and sing. This seems really to
+represent something, but how much I put forth not the slightest
+pretension to measure. In fact I think I am not measuring anything
+whatever just now, and not pretending to--I find myself, much more,
+quite consentingly dumb in the presence of the boundless enormity; and
+when I wish to give myself the best possible account of this state of
+mind I call it the pious attitude of waiting. Verily there is much to
+wait for--but there I am at it again, and should blush to offer you in
+the midst of what I believe to be your more grandly attuned state, such
+a pale apology for a living faith. Probably all that's the matter with
+one is one's vicious propensity to go on feeling more and more, instead
+of less and less--which would be so infinitely more convenient; for the
+former course puts one really quite out of relation to almost everybody
+else and causes one to circle helplessly round outer social edges like a
+kind of prowling pariah. However, I try to be as stupid as I can....
+
+All the while, with this, I am not expressing my deep appreciation of
+your generous remarks about again placing Frederick at my disposition. I
+am doing perfectly well in these conditions without a servant; my life
+is so simplified that all acuteness of need has been abated; in short I
+manage--and it is of course fortunate, inasmuch as the question would
+otherwise not be at all practically soluble. No young man of military
+age would I for a moment consider--and in fact there _are_ none about,
+putting aside the physically inapt (for the Army)--and these are kept
+tight hold of by those who can use them. Small boys and aged men are
+alone available--but the matter has in short not the least importance.
+The thing that most assuages me continues to be dealing with the wounded
+in such scant measure as I may; such, e.g., as my having turned into
+Victoria Station, yesterday afternoon, to buy an evening paper and there
+been so struck with the bad lameness of a poor hobbling khaki
+convalescent that I inquired of him to such sympathetic effect that, by
+what I can make out, I must have committed myself to the support of him
+for the remainder of his days--a trifle on account having sealed the
+compact on the spot. It all helps, however--helps _me_; which is so much
+what I do it for. Let it help _you_ by ricochet, even a little too....
+
+...Good-bye for now, and believe me, less gracelessly and faithlessly
+than you might well, your would-be so decent old
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+March 27th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Thomas and my dear Lilla:
+*/
+
+Don't resent please the economic form of this address, the frugal
+attempt to make one grateful acknowledgment serve for both of you: for I
+think that if you were just now on this scene itself there isn't a shade
+of anxious simplification that you wouldn't at once perfectly grasp. The
+effect of the biggest and most appalling complication the world has ever
+known is somehow, paradoxically, as we used to say at Newport, an effect
+of simplification too--producing, that is, a desperate need for the
+same, in all sorts of ways, lest one be submerged by the monster of a
+myriad bristles. In short you do understand of course, and how it is
+that I should be invidiously writing to _you_, Lilla, in response to
+your refreshing favour of some little time since (the good one about
+your having shrieked Rule Britannia at somebody's lecture, or at least
+done something quite as vociferous and to the point, and quite as
+helpful to our sacred cause). This exclusive benefit should you be
+enjoying, I say, hadn't a most beneficial letter from Thomas come to me
+but yesterday, crowning the edifice of a series of suchlike bounties
+which he has been so patient over my poor old inevitable silence
+about....
+
+You inflame me so scarcely less, Thomas, with your wonderful statistics
+of the American theatre of my infancy, a propos of my printed prattle
+about it, that I could almost find it in me to inquire from what
+published source it is you recover the ghostly little facts. Are they
+presented in some procurable volume that would be possible to send me? I
+ask with a queer dim feeling that they might, or the fingered volume
+might, operate as a blest little diversion from our eternal obsession
+here. I have reached the point now, after eight months of that
+oppression, of cultivating small arts of escape, small plunges into
+oblivion and dissimulation; in fact I am able to read again--for ever so
+long this power was almost blighted--and to want to become as
+dissociated as possible from the present.
+
+...However, I didn't mean to be black--but only pearly grey, as your
+letter so benevolently incites: yours too, Lilla, for I keep you
+together in all this. And I don't, you see, pretend to treat you to any
+scrap of information whatever--you have more of the public, of a hundred
+sorts, than we, I guess: and the private mostly turns out, in these
+parts, to go but on one leg, after the first fond glimpse of it. I
+lunched yesterday with the Prime Minister, on the chance of catching
+some gleam between the chinks--which was idiotic of me, because it's
+mostly in those circles that the chinks are well puttied over. The
+nearest I came to any such was through my being told by a member of the
+P.M.'s family, whom I wouldn't enable you to identify for the world,
+that she had heard him just before luncheon say to three or four members
+of the Government, and even Cabinet, gathered at the house, that
+something-or-other was "the most awkward situation he had ever found
+himself up against": with the comment that she, my informant, was in
+liveliest suspense to know what it was he had alluded to in those
+portentous terms. Which I give, however, but as a specimen of the
+_bouche_ chink, not of the gaping; the admirable (as I think him, quite
+affectionately think him) Master of the Situation having presently
+joined us in the most unmistakeable serenity of strength and cheer, and
+the riddle remaining at any rate without the least pretence of, or for
+that matter need of, a key. It will be a hundred years old by the time
+my small anecdote reaches you, and not have _le moindre rapport_ to
+anything that in the least concerns us _then_. But I must tear myself
+from you, and try withal to close on some sublime note--a large choice
+of which sort I feel we are for that matter perfectly possessed of.
+Well, then, a friend of much veracity told me a couple of days since
+that a friend of his (I admit that it's always a friend of somebody
+else's,) an officer of the upper command, just over for a couple of days
+from the Front, had spoken to him of the now enormous mass of the French
+and British troops fronting the enemy as covering, in dense gatheredness
+together, 40 miles of the land of France--I don't mean in length of
+front, of course, which would be nothing, but in rearward extent and
+just standing, so to speak, in close-packed available spatial presence.
+But there I am at an item--and I abjure items, they defy all dealing
+with, and am your affectionate old
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edward Marsh._
+
+/#
+ A copy of this letter was sent by Mr. Marsh to Rupert Brooke, then
+ with the Dardanelles Expeditionary Force; it reached him two days
+ before his death. The letter refers of course to his "1914"
+ Sonnets. The line criticised in the first sonnet is: "And the worst
+ friend and enemy is but death."
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+March 28th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear admirable Eddie!
+*/
+
+I take it very kindly indeed of you to have found thought and time to
+send me the publication with the five brave sonnets. The circumstances
+(so to call the unspeakable matter) that have conduced to them, and
+that, taken together, seem to make a sort of huge brazen lap for their
+congruous beauty, have caused me to read them with an emotion that
+somehow precludes the critical measure, deprecates the detachment
+involved in that, and makes me just want--oh so exceedingly much--to be
+moved by them and to "like" and admire them. So I do greet them gladly,
+and am right consentingly struck with their happy force and truth: they
+seem to me to have _come_, in a fine high beauty and sincerity (though
+not in every line with an equal _degree_ of those--which indeed is a
+rare case anywhere;) and this evening, alone by my lamp, I have been
+reading them over and over to myself aloud, as if fondly to test and
+truly to try them; almost in fact as if to reach the far-off author, in
+whatever unimaginable conditions, by some miraculous, some telepathic
+intimation that I am in quavering communion with him. Well, they have
+borne the test with almost all the firm perfection, or straight
+inevitability, that one must find in a sonnet, and beside their poetic
+strength they draw a wondrous weight from his having had the _right_ to
+produce them, as it were, and their rising out of such rare realities of
+experience. Splendid Rupert--to be the soldier that could beget them on
+the Muse! and lucky Muse, not less, who could have an affair with a
+soldier and yet feel herself not guilty of the least deviation! In order
+of felicity I think Sonnet I comes first, save for a small matter that
+(perhaps superfluously) troubles me and that I will presently speak of.
+I place next III, with its splendid first line; and then V ("In that
+rich earth a richer dust concealed!") and then II. I don't speak of No.
+IV--I think it the least fortunate (in spite of "Touched flowers and
+furs, and cheeks!") But the four happy ones are very noble and sound and
+round, to my sense, and I take off my hat to them, and to their author,
+in the most marked manner. There are many things one likes, simply, and
+then there are things one likes to like (or at least that I do;) and
+these are of that order. My reserve on No. I bears on the last line--to
+the extent, I mean, of not feeling happy about that _but_ before the
+last word. It may be fatuous, but I am wondering if this line mightn't
+have acquitted itself better as: "And the worst friend and foe is only
+death." There is an "only" in the preceding line, but the repetition
+is--or would be--to me not only not objectionable, but would have
+positive merit. My only other wince is over the "given" and "heaven"
+rhyme at the end of V; it has been so inordinately vulgarized that I
+don't think it good enough company for the rest of the sonnet, which
+without it I think I would have put second in order instead of the III.
+The kind of idea it embodies is one that always so fetches _this_ poor
+old Anglomaniac. But that is all--and this, my dear Eddie, is all. Don't
+dream of acknowledging these remarks in all your strain and stress--that
+you should think I could bear that would fill me with horror. The only
+sign I want is that if you should be able to write to Rupert, which I
+don't doubt you on occasion manage, you would tell him of my pleasure
+and my pride. If he should be at all touched by this it would infinitely
+touch _me_. In fact, should you care to send him on this sprawl, that
+would save you other trouble, and I would risk his impatience. I think
+of him quite inordinately, and not less so of you, my dear Eddie, and am
+yours all faithfully and gratefully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+P.S. I have been again reading out V, to myself (I read them very well),
+and find I _don't_ so much mind that blighted balance!
+
+
+
+
+_To Edward Marsh._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+March 30th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Eddie,
+*/
+
+After my acknowledgment of the beautiful things had gone to you, came in
+your note, and now your quite blessed letter. So I call it because it
+testified to my having so happily given you that particular pleasure
+which is the finest, I think, one can feel--the joy in short that you
+allude to and that I myself rejoice in your taking. Splendid Rupert
+indeed--and splendid _you_, in the generosity of your emotion!
+
+I had stupidly overlooked that preliminary lyric, with its so charming
+climax of an image. But I think--if you won't feel me over-contentious
+for it--that your reasoning a propos of "heaven, given" &c. rather halts
+as to the matter of rhyme and sense, or in other words sense and poetic
+expression. Note well that, poetically speaking, it's not the sense
+that's the expression, the "rhyme" or whatever, but those things that
+are the sense, and that they so far betray it when they find for the
+"only" words any but the ideally right or the (so to speak) quietly
+proud. However, I didn't mean to plunge into these depths--there are too
+many other depths now; I only meant to tell you how I participate and to
+be yours, in this, all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wharton._
+
+/#
+ Lieut. Jean du Breuil de St. Germain, distinguished cavalry
+ officer, sociologist, traveller, was killed in action near Arras,
+ February 22, 1915.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+April 3rd, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Edith,
+*/
+
+Bounties unacknowledged and unmeasured continue to flow in from you, for
+this a.m., after your beautiful letter enclosing your copy of M.
+Seguier's so extraordinarily fine and touching one, arrive your two
+_livraisons_ of the Revue containing the Dixmude of which you wrote me.
+It is quite heartbreakingly noble of you to find initiative for the
+rendering and the remembering of such services and such assurances, for
+I myself gaze at almost _any_ display of initiative as I should stare at
+a passing charge of cavalry down the Brompton Road--where we haven't
+come to that yet, though we may for one reason and another indeed soon
+have to. One is surrounded in fact here with more affirmations of energy
+than you might gather from some of the accounts of matters that appear
+in the _Times_, and yet the paralysis of my own power to do anything
+but increasingly and inordinately _feel_, feel in a way to make
+communication with almost all others impossible, they living and
+thinking in such different terms--and yet that paralysis, _dis-je_, more
+and more swallows up everything but the sore and sterile unresting
+imagination. I can't proceed upon it after your sublime fashion--and in
+fact its aching life is a practical destruction of every other sort,
+which is why I call it sterile. But the extent, all the same, to which
+one will have inwardly and darkly and drearily and dreadfully
+lived!--with those victims of nervous horror in the ambulance-church,
+the little chanting country church of the deadly serried beds of your
+Verdun letter, and those others, the lacerated and untended in the
+"fetid stable-heat" of the other place and the second letter--all of
+whom live _with_ me and haunt and "inhibit" me. And so does your friend
+du Breuil, and _his_ friend your admirable correspondent (in what a
+nobleness and blest adequacy of expression their feeling finds
+relief)--and this in spite of my having neither known nor seen either of
+them; Seguier creating in one to positive sickness the personal pang
+about your friend and his, and his letter making me feel the horror it
+does himself, even as if my affection had something at stake in that.
+But I don't know why I treat you thus to the detail of one's
+perpetually-renewed waste. You will have plenty of detail of your own,
+little waste as I see you allowing yourself.
+
+I haven't yet had the hour of reading your Dixmudes, which I am
+momentarily reserving, under some other pressure, but they shall not
+miss my fond care--so little has any face of the nightmare been
+reflected for me in any form of beauty as yet; your Verdun letter
+excepted. This keeps making mere blue-books and yellow-books and
+rapports the only reading that isn't, or that hasn't been, below the
+level; through their not pretending to express but only giving one the
+material. As it happens, when your Revues came I was reading Georges
+Ohnet and in one of the three fascicules of his Bourgeois de Paris that
+have alone, as yet, turned up here! and reading him, _ma foi_, with deep
+submission to his spell! Funny enough to be redevable at this time of
+day to that genius, who has come down from the cross where poor
+vanquished Jules Lemaitre long ago nailed him up, as if to work fresh
+miracles, dancing for it on Jules's very grave. But he is in fact
+extraordinarily vivid and candid and amusing, with the force of an angry
+little hunchback and a perfect and quite gratifying vulgarity of
+passion; also, probably, with a perfect enormity of _vente_--in which
+one takes pleasure.
+
+Easter has operated to clear London in something like the fine old
+way--we would really seem to stick so much to our fine old ways. I don't
+truly know what to make of some of them--and yet don't let yourself
+suppose from some of such appearances that the stiffness and toughness
+of the country isn't on the whole deeper than anything else. Such at
+least is my own indefeasible conviction--or impression. It's the
+queerest of peoples--with its merits and defects so extraordinarily
+parts of each other; its wantonness of refusals--in some of these
+present ways--such a part of its attachment to freedom, of the
+individualism which makes its force that of a collection of individuals
+and its voluntaryism of such a strong quality. But it won't be the
+defects, it will be the merits, I believe, that will have the last word.
+Strange that the country should need a still bigger convulsion--for
+itself; it does, however, and it will get it--and will act under it.
+France has had hers in the form of invasion--and I don't know of what
+form ours will yet have to be. But it will come--and then we
+shall--damp and dense, but not vicious, not vicious _enough_, and
+immensely capable if we can once get _dry_. _Voila_ that _I_ am,
+however; yet with it so yours,
+
+/*
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edward Marsh._
+
+/#
+ Rupert Brooke died on a French hospital-ship in the Aegean Sea,
+ April 28, 1915, while serving with the Royal Naval Division.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+April 24th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear dear Eddie,
+*/
+
+This is too horrible and heart-breaking. If there was a stupid and
+hideous disfigurement of life and outrage to beauty left for our awful
+conditions to perpetrate, those things have been now supremely achieved,
+and no other brutal blow in the private sphere can better them for
+making one just stare through one's tears. One had thought of one's self
+as advised and stiffened as to what was possible, but one sees (or at
+least I feel) how sneakingly one had clung to the idea of the happy, the
+favouring, hazard, the dream of what still might be for the days to
+come. But why do I speak of my pang, as if it had a right to breathe in
+presence of yours?--which makes me think of you with the last tenderness
+of understanding. I value extraordinarily having seen him here in the
+happiest way (in Downing St., &c.) two or three times before he left
+England, and I measure by that the treasure of your own memories and the
+dead weight of your own loss. What a price and a refinement of beauty
+and poetry it gives to those splendid sonnets--which will enrich our
+whole collective consciousness. We must speak further and better, but
+meanwhile all my impulse is to tell you to entertain the pang and taste
+the bitterness for all they are "worth"--to know to the fullest extent
+what has happened to you and not miss one of the hard ways in which it
+will come home. You won't have again any relation of that beauty, won't
+know again that mixture of the elements that made him. And he was the
+breathing beneficent man--and now turned to this! But there's something
+to keep too--his legend and his image will hold. Believe by how much I
+am, my dear Eddie, more than ever yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To G. W. Prothero._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+April 24th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dear George,
+*/
+
+I can't not thank you for your interesting remittances, the one about
+the Salubrity of the Soldier perhaps in particular. That paper is indeed
+an admirable statement of what one is mainly struck with--the only at
+all consoling thing in all the actual horror, namely: the splendid
+personal condition of the khaki-clad as they overflow the town. It
+represents a kind of physical _redemption_--and that is something, is
+much, so long as the individual case of it lasts.
+
+As for the President, he is really looking up. I feel as if it kind of
+made everything else do so! It does at any rate your all-faithful old
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Wilfred Sheridan._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+May 31st, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear dear Wilfred,
+*/
+
+I have been hearing from Clare and Margaret, and writing to them--with
+the effect on my feelings so great that even if I hadn't got their leave
+to address you thus directly, and their impression that you would
+probably have patience with me, I should still be perpetrating this act,
+from the simple force of--well, let me say of fond affection and have
+done with it. I really take as much interest in your movements and
+doings, in all your conditions, as if I were Margaret herself--such
+great analogies prevail between the heavy uncle and the infant daughter
+when following their object up is concerned. I haven't kept my thoughts
+off you at all--not indeed that I have tried!--since those days early in
+the winter, in that little London house, where you were so admirably
+interesting and vivid about your first initiations and impressions and I
+pressed you so hard over the whole ground, and didn't know whether most
+to feel your acute intelligence at play or your kindness to your poor
+old gaping visitor. I've neglected no opportunity of news of you since
+then, though I've picked the article up in every and any way save by
+writing to you--which my respect for your worried attention and general
+overstrain forbade me to regard as a decent act. At the same time, when
+I heard of your having, at Crowborough or wherever, a sharp illness of
+some duration, I turned really sick myself for sympathy--I couldn't see
+the faintest propriety in that. And now my sentiments hover about you
+with the closest fidelity, and when I think of the stiff experience and
+all the strange initiations (so to express my sense of them) that must
+have crowded upon you, I am lost in awe at the vision. For you're the
+kind of defender of his country to whom I take off my hat most abjectly
+and utterly--the thinking, feeling, refining hero, who knows and
+compares, and winces and overcomes, and on whose lips I promise myself
+one of these days to hang again with a gape even beyond that of last
+winter. I wish to goodness I could do something more and better for you
+than merely address you these vain words; however, they won't hurt you
+at least, for they carry with them an intensity of good will. I won't
+pretend to give you any news, for it's you who make all ours--and we are
+now really in the way, I think, of doing everything conceivable to back
+you up in that, and thereby become worthy of you. America, my huge queer
+country, is being flouted by Germany in a manner that looks more and
+more like a malignant design, and if this should (very soon) truly
+appear, and that weight of consequent prodigious resentment should be
+able to do nothing else than throw itself into the scale, then we should
+be backing you up to some purpose. The weight would in one way and
+another be overwhelming. But these are vast issues, and I have only
+wanted to give you for the moment my devotedest personal blessing. Think
+of me as in the closest sustaining communion with Clare, and don't for a
+moment dream that I propose--I mean presume--to lay upon you the
+smallest burden of notice of the present beyond just letting it remind
+you of the fond faith of yours, my dear Wilfred, all affectionately,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edward Marsh._
+
+/#
+ The volume sent by Mr. Marsh was Rupert Brooke's _1914 and other
+ Poems_.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+June 6th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Eddie,
+*/
+
+I thank you ever so kindly for this advance copy of Rupert's volume,
+which you were right (and blest!) in feeling that I should intensely
+prize. I have been spending unspeakable hours over it--heart-breaking
+ones, under the sense of the stupid extinction of so exquisite an
+instrument and so exquisite a being. Immense the generosity of his
+response to life and the beauty and variety of the forms in which it
+broke out, and of which these further things are such an enriching
+exhibition. His place is now very high and very safe--even though one
+walks round and round it with the aching soreness of having to take the
+monument for the man. It's so wretched talking, really, of any "place"
+but his place _with_ us, and in our eyes and affection most of all, the
+other being such as could wait, and grow with all confidence and power
+_while_ waiting. He has something, at any rate, one feels in this
+volume, that puts him singularly apart even in his eminence--the fact
+that, member of the true high company as he is and poet of the strong
+wings (for he seems to me extraordinarily strong,) he has _charm_ in a
+way of a kind that belong to none of the others, who have their beauty
+and abundance, their distinction and force and grace, whatever it may
+be, but haven't that particular thing as he has it and as he was going
+to keep on having it, since it was of his very nature--by which I mean
+that of his genius. The point is that I think he would still have had it
+even if he had grown bigger and bigger, and stronger and stronger (for
+this is what he _would_ have done,) and thereby been almost alone in
+this idiosyncrasy. Even of Keats I don't feel myself saying that he had
+charm--it's all lost in the degree of beauty, which somehow allows it no
+chance. But in Rupert (not that I match them!) there is the beauty, so
+great, and then the charm, different and playing beside it and savouring
+of the very quality of the man. What it comes to, I suppose, is that he
+touches me most when he is whimsical and personal, even at the poetic
+pitch, or in the poetic purity, as he perpetually is. And he penetrates
+me most when he is most hauntingly (or hauntedly) English--he draws such
+a real magic from his conscious reference to it. He is extraordinarily
+so even in the War sonnets--not that that isn't highly natural too; and
+the reading of these higher things over now, which one had first read
+while he was still there to be exquisitely at stake in them, so to
+speak, is a sort of refinement both of admiration and of anguish. The
+present gives them such sincerity--as if they had wanted it! I adore the
+ironic and familiar things, the most intimately English--the Chilterns
+and the Great Lover (towards the close of which I recognise the misprint
+you speak of, but fortunately so obvious a one--the more flagrant the
+better--that you needn't worry:) and the Funeral of Youth, awfully
+charming; and of course Grantchester, which is booked for immortality. I
+revel in Grantchester--and how it would have made one love him if one
+hadn't known him. As it is it wrings the heart! And yet after all what
+do they do, all of them together, but again express how life had been
+wonderful and crowded and fortunate and exquisite for him?--with his
+sensibilities all so exposed, really exposed, and yet never taking the
+least real harm. He seems to me to have had in his short life so much
+that one may almost call it everything. And he isn't tragic now--he has
+only stopped. It's we who are tragic--you and his mother especially, and
+whatever others; for we can't stop, and we wish we could. The portrait
+has extreme beauty, but is somehow disconnected. However, great beauty
+does disconnect! But good-night--with the lively sense that I _must_ see
+you again before I leave town--which won't be, though, before early in
+July. I hope you are having less particular strain and stress and am
+yours all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edward Marsh._
+
+/#
+ This refers to a photograph of Rupert Brooke, sent by Mr. Marsh,
+ and to the death of his friend Denis Browne, who was with R. B.
+ when he died. A letter from Browne, describing Rupert Brooke's
+ burial on the island of Scyros, had been read to H. J. by Mr. Marsh
+ the day before the following was written.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+June 13th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Eddie,
+*/
+
+The photograph is wonderful and beautiful--and a mockery! I mean
+encompassed with such an ache and such a pang that it sets up for one's
+vision a regularly accepted, unabated pain. And now _you_ have another
+of like sort, the fruit of this horrible time--which I presume almost to
+share with you, as a sign of the tenderness I bear you. I wish indeed
+that for this I might once have _seen_ D. B., kind brothering D. B., the
+reading by you of whose letter last night, under the pang of _his_
+extinction, the ghost telling of the ghost, moved me more than I could
+find words for. He brothered you almost as much as he had brothered
+Rupert--and I could almost feel that he practically a little brothered
+poor old _me_, for which I so thank his spirit! And this now the end of
+his brothering! Of anything more in his later letter that had any
+_relation_ you will perhaps still some day tell me....
+
+/*
+Yours all faithfully,
+
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Compton Mackenzie._
+
+/#
+ Mr. Mackenzie was at this time attached to Sir Ian Hamilton's
+ headquarters with the Dardanelles Expeditionary Force.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+June 18th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Monty,
+*/
+
+All this while have I remained shamefully in your debt for interesting
+news, and I am plunged deeper into that condition by your admirable
+report from the Dardanelles in this a.m.'s Times. I am a backward being,
+alas, in these days when so much is forward; our public anxieties
+somehow strike for me at the roots of letter-writing, and I remain too
+often dumb, not because I am not thinking and feeling a thousand things,
+but exactly because I am doing so to such intensity. You wrote me weeks
+ago that you had finished your new novel--which information took my
+breath away (I mean by its windlike rush)--and now has come thus much of
+the remainder of the adventure for which that so grandly liberated you
+and which I follow with the liveliest participation in all your splendid
+sense of it and profit of it. I confess I take an enormous pleasure in
+the fact of the exposure of the sensitive plate of your imagination,
+your tremendous attention, to all these wonderful and terrible things.
+What impressions you are getting, verily--and what a breach must it all
+not make with the course of history you are practising up to the very
+eve. I rejoice that you finished and snipped off, or tucked in and wound
+up, something self-contained there--for how could you ever go back to it
+if you hadn't?--under that violence of rupture with the past which makes
+me ask myself what will have become of all that material we were taking
+for granted, and which now lies there behind us like some vast damaged
+cargo dumped upon a dock and unfit for human purchase or consumption. I
+seem to fear that I shall find myself seeing your recently concluded
+novel as through a glass darkly--which, however, will not prevent my
+immediately falling upon it when it appears; as I assume, however, that
+it is not now likely to do before the summer's end--by which time God
+knows what other monstrous chapters of history won't have been
+perpetrated! What I most want to say to you, I think, is that I rejoice
+for you with all my heart in that assurance of health which has enabled
+you so to gird yourself and go forth. If the torrid south has always
+been good for you there must be no amount of it that you are now not
+getting--though I am naturally reduced, you see, to quite abjectly
+helpless and incompetent supposition. I hang about you at any rate with
+all sorts of vows and benedictions. I feel that I mustn't make remarks
+about the colossal undertaking you are engaged in beyond saying that I
+believe with all my heart in the final power of your push. As for our
+news here the gist of that is that we are living with our eyes on you
+and more and more materially backing you. My comment on you is feeble,
+but my faith absolute, and I am, my dear Monty, your more than ever
+faithful old
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+P.S. I have your address, of many integuments, from your mother, but
+feel rather that my mountain of envelopes should give birth to a
+livelier mouse!
+
+
+
+
+_To Henry James, junior._
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+June 24th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Harry,
+*/
+
+I am writing to you in this fashion even although I am writing you
+"intimately"; because I am not at the present moment in very good form
+for any free play of hand, and this machinery helps me so much when
+there is any question of pressure and promptitude, or above all of
+particular clearness. That _is_ the case at present--at least I feel I
+ought to lose no more time.
+
+You will wonder what these rather portentous words refer to--but don't
+be too much alarmed! It is only that my feeling about my situation here
+has under the stress of events come so much to a head that, certain
+particular matters further contributing, I have arranged to seek
+technical (legal) advice no longer hence than this afternoon as to the
+exact modus operandi of my becoming naturalised in this country. This
+state of mind probably won't at all surprise you, however; and I think I
+can assure you that it certainly wouldn't if you were now on the scene
+here with me and had the near vision of all the circumstances. My sense
+of how everything more and more makes for it has been gathering force
+ever since the war broke out, and I have thus waited nearly a whole
+year; but my feeling has become acute with the information that I can
+only go down to Lamb House now on the footing of an Alien under Police
+supervision--an alien friend of course, which is a very different thing
+from an alien enemy, but still a definite technical outsider to the
+whole situation here, in which my affections and my loyalty are so
+intensely engaged. I feel that if I take this step I shall simply
+rectify a position that has become inconveniently and uncomfortably
+false, making my civil status merely agree not only with my moral, but
+with my material as well, in every kind of way. Hadn't it been for the
+War I should certainly have gone on as I was, taking it as the simplest
+and easiest and even friendliest thing: but the circumstances are
+utterly altered now, and to feel with the country and the cause as
+absolutely and ardently as I feel, and not offer them my moral support
+with a perfect consistency (my material is too small a matter), affects
+me as standing off or wandering loose in a detachment of no great
+dignity. I have spent here all the best years of my life--they
+practically have _been_ my life: about a twelvemonth hence I shall have
+been domiciled uninterruptedly in England for forty years, and there is
+not the least possibility, at my age, and in my state of health, of my
+ever returning to the U.S. or taking up any relation with it as a
+country. My practical relation has been to this one for ever so long,
+and now my "spiritual" or "sentimental" quite ideally matches it. I am
+telling you all this because I can't not want exceedingly to take you
+into my confidence about it--but again I feel pretty certain that you
+will understand me too well for any great number of words more to be
+needed. The real truth is that in a matter of this kind, under such
+extraordinarily special circumstances, one's own intimate feeling must
+speak and determine the case. Well, without haste and without rest, mine
+has done so, and with the prospect of what I have called the
+rectification, a sense of great relief, a great lapse of awkwardness,
+supervenes.
+
+I think that even if by chance your so judicious mind should be disposed
+to suggest any reserves--I think, I say, that I should then still ask
+you not to launch them at me unless they should seem to you so important
+as to balance against my own argument and, frankly speaking, my own
+absolute need and passion here; which the whole experience of the past
+year has made quite unspeakably final. I can't imagine at all what these
+objections should be, however--my whole long relation to the country
+having been what it is. Regard my proceeding as a simple act and
+offering of allegiance and devotion, recognition and gratitude (for long
+years of innumerable relations that have meant so much to me,) and it
+remains perfectly simple. Let me repeat that I feel sure I shouldn't in
+the least have come to it without this convulsion, but one is _in_ the
+convulsion (I wouldn't be out of it either!) and one must act
+accordingly. I feel all the while too that the tide of American identity
+of consciousness with our own, about the whole matter, rises and rises,
+and will rise still more before it rests again--so that every day the
+difference of situation diminishes and the immense fund of common
+sentiment increases. However, I haven't really meant so much to
+expatiate. What I am doing this afternoon is, I think, simply to get
+exact information--though I am already sufficiently aware of the
+question to know that after my long existence here the process of
+naturalisation is very simple and short.... My last word about the
+matter, at any rate, has to be that my decision is absolutely tied up
+with my innermost personal feeling. I think that will only make you
+glad, however, and I add nothing more now but that I am your
+all-affectionate old Uncle,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edmund Gosse._
+
+/#
+ H. J.'s four sponsors at his naturalisation were Mr. Asquith, Mr.
+ Gosse, Mr. J. B. Pinker, and Mr. G. W. Prothero.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+June 25th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Gosse,
+*/
+
+Remarkably enough, I should be writing you this evening even if I hadn't
+received your interesting information about ----, concerning whom
+nothing perversely base and publicly pernicious at all surprises me. He
+is the cleverest idiot and the most pernicious talent imaginable, and I
+await to see if he won't somehow swing--!
+
+But il ne s'agit pas de ca; il s'agit of the fact that there is a matter
+I should have liked to speak to you of the other day when you lunched
+here, yet hung fire about through its not having then absolutely come to
+a head. It has within these days done so, and in brief it is _this_. The
+force of the public situation now at last determines me to testify to my
+attachment to this country, my fond domicile for nearly forty years
+(forty _next_ year,) by applying for naturalisation here: the throwing
+of my imponderable moral weight into the scale of her fortune is the
+_geste_ that will best express my devotion--absolutely nothing _else_
+will. Therefore my mind is made up, and you are the first person save my
+Solicitor (whom I have had to consult) to whom the fact has been
+imparted. Kindly respect for the moment the privacy of it. I learned
+with horror just lately that if I go down into Sussex (for two or three
+months of Rye) I have at once to register myself there as an Alien and
+place myself under the observation of the Police. But that is only the
+_occasion_ of my decision--it's not in the least the cause. The
+disposition itself has haunted me as Wordsworth's sounding cataract
+haunted _him_--"like a passion"--ever since the beginning of the War.
+But the point, please, is this: that the process for me is really of the
+simplest, and _may_ be very rapid, if I can obtain four honourable
+householders to testify to their knowledge of me as a respectable
+person, "speaking and writing English decently" etc. Will you give me
+the great pleasure of being one of them?--signing a paper to that
+effect? I should take it ever so kindly. And I should further take
+kindly your giving me if possible your sense on _this_ delicate point.
+Should you say that our admirable friend the Prime Minister would
+perhaps be approachable by me as another of the signatory four?--to
+whom, you see, great historic honour, not to say immortality, as my
+sponsors, will accrue. I don't like to approach him without your so
+qualified sense of the matter first--and he has always been so
+beautifully kind and charming to me. I will do nothing till I hear from
+you--but his signature (which my solicitor's representative, if not
+himself, would simply wait upon him for) would enormously accelerate the
+putting through of the application and the disburdening me of the Sussex
+"restricted area" alienship--which it distresses me to carry on my back
+a day longer than I need. I have in mind my other two sponsors, but if I
+could have from you, in addition to your own personal response, on which
+my hopes are so founded, your ingenious prefiguration (fed by your
+intimacy with him) as to how the P.M. would "take" my appeal, you would
+increase the obligations of yours all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To J. B. Pinker._
+
+/#
+ The two articles here referred to, "The Long Wards" and "Within the
+ Rim," were both eventually devoted to charitable purposes.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+June 29th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Pinker,
+*/
+
+I am glad to hear from you of the conditions in which the New York
+Tribune representative thinks there will be no difficulty over the fee
+for the article. I have in point of fact during the last three or four
+days considerably written one--concerning which a question comes up
+which I hope you won't think too tiresome. Making up my mind that
+something as concrete and "human" as possible would be my best card to
+play, I have done something about the British soldier, his aspect,
+temper and tone, and the considerations he suggests, _as I have seen him
+since the beginning of the war in Hospital_; where I have in fact
+largely and constantly seen him. The theme lends itself, by my sense,
+much; and I dare say I should have it rather to myself--though of course
+there is no telling! But what I have been feeling in the
+connection--having now done upwards of 3000 words--is that I should be
+very grateful for leave to make them 4000 (without of course extension
+of fee.) I have never been good for the mere snippet, and there is so
+much to say and to feel! Would you mind asking her, in reporting to her
+of what my subject is, whether this extra thousand would incommode them.
+If she really objects to it I think I shall be then disposed to ask you
+to make some _other_ application of my little paper (on the 4000 basis;)
+in which case I should propose to the Tribune another idea, keeping it
+down absolutely to the 3000. (I'm afraid I can't do less than that.) My
+motive would probably in that case be a quite different and less
+"concrete" thing; namely, the expression of my sense of the way the
+Briton in general feels about his insulation, and his being in it and of
+it, even through all this unprecedented stress. It would amount to a
+statement or picture of his sense of the way his sea-genius has always
+encircled and protected him, striking deep into his blood and his bones;
+so that any reconsideration of his position in a new light inevitably
+comes hard to him, and yet makes the process the effective development
+of which it is interesting to watch. I should call this thing something
+like "The New Vision," or, better still, simply "Insulation": though I
+don't say _exactly_ that. At all events I should be able to make
+something interesting of it, and it would of course inevitably take the
+sympathetic turn. But I would _rather_ keep to the thing I have been
+trying, if I may have the small extra space....
+
+/*
+Believe me yours ever,
+
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Frederic Harrison._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+July 3rd, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Frederic Harrison,
+*/
+
+I think your so interesting letter of the other day most kind and
+generous--it has greatly touched me. Mrs. Harrison had written me a
+short time before, even more movingly, and with equal liberality, and I
+feel my belated remembrance of you magnificently recognised. This has
+been a most healing fact for me in a lacerated world. How splendid your
+courage and activity and power, so continued, of production and
+attention! I am sorry to say I find any such power in myself much
+impaired and diminished--reduced to the shadow of what it once was. All
+relations are dislocated and harmonies falsified, and one asks one's
+self of what use, in such a general condition, is any direction of the
+mind save straight to the thing that most and only matters. However, it
+all comes back to that, and one does what one can because it's a _part_
+of virtue. Also I find one is the better for every successful effort to
+bring one's attention _home_. I have just read your "English" review of
+Lord Eversley's book on Poland, which you have made me desire at once to
+get and read--even though your vivid summary makes me also falter before
+the hideous old tragedy over which the actual horrors are being
+re-embroidered. I thank you further for letting me know of your paper in
+the Aberdeen magazine--though on reflection I can wait for it if it's to
+be included in your volume now so soon to appear--I shall so straightly
+possess myself of that. As to the U.S.A., I am afraid I suffer almost
+more than I can endure from the terms of precautionary "friendship" on
+which my country is content to remain with the author of such systematic
+abominations--I cover my head with my mantle in presence of so much
+wordy amicable discussing and conversing and reassuring and postponing,
+all the while that such hideous evil and cruelty rages. To drag into our
+European miseries any nation that is so fortunate as to be out of them,
+and able to remain out with common self-respect, would be a deplorable
+wish--but that holds true but up to a certain line of compromise. I
+can't help feeling that for the U.S. this line has been crossed, and
+that they have themselves great dangers, from the source of all ours, to
+reckon with. However, one fortunately hasn't to decide the case or
+appoint the hour--the relation between the two countries affects me as
+being on a stiff downward slope at the bottom of which is rupture, and
+_everything_ that takes place between them renders that incline more
+rapid and shoves the position further down. The material and moral
+weight that America would be able to throw into the scale by her
+productive and financial power strikes me as enormous. There would be no
+question of munitions then. What I mean is that I believe the truculence
+of Germany may be trusted, from one month or one week to another now, to
+force the American hand. It must indeed be helpful to both of you to
+breathe your fine air of the heights. The atmosphere of London just now
+is not positively tonic; but one must _find_ a tone, and I am, with more
+faithful thought of Mrs. Harrison than I can express, your and her
+affectionate old friend,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To H. G. Wells._
+
+/#
+ H. J. was always inclined to be impatient of the art of parody. The
+ following refers to an example of it in Mr. Wells's volume, _Boon_.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+July 6th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Wells,
+*/
+
+I was given yesterday at a club your volume "Boon, etc.," from a loose
+leaf in which I learn that you kindly sent it me and which yet appears
+to have lurked there for a considerable time undelivered. I have just
+been reading, to acknowledge it intelligently, a considerable number of
+its pages--though not all; for, to be perfectly frank, I have been in
+that respect beaten for the first time--or rather for the first time but
+one--by a book of yours; I haven't found the current of it draw me on
+and on this time--as, unfailingly and irresistibly, before (which I
+have repeatedly let you know.) However, I shall try again--I hate to
+lose any scrap of you that _may_ make for light or pleasure; and
+meanwhile I have more or less mastered your appreciation of H. J., which
+I have found very curious and interesting after a fashion--though it has
+naturally not filled me with a fond elation. It is difficult of course
+for a writer to put himself _fully_ in the place of another writer who
+finds him extraordinarily futile and void, and who is moved to publish
+that to the world--and I think the case isn't easier when he happens to
+have enjoyed the other writer enormously from far back; because there
+has then grown up the habit of taking some common meeting-ground between
+them for granted, and the falling away of this is like the collapse of a
+bridge which made communication possible. But I am by nature more in
+dread of any fool's paradise, or at least of any bad misguidedness, than
+in love with the idea of a security proved, and the fact that a mind as
+brilliant as yours can resolve me into such an unmitigated mistake,
+can't enjoy me in anything like the degree in which I like to think I
+may be enjoyed, makes me greatly want to fix myself, for as long as my
+nerves will stand it, with such a pair of eyes. I am aware of certain
+things I have, and not less conscious, I believe, of various others that
+I am simply reduced to wish I did or could have; so I try, for possible
+light, to enter into the feelings of a critic for whom the deficiencies
+so preponderate. The difficulty about that effort, however, is that one
+can't keep it up--one _has_ to fall back on one's sense of one's good
+parts--one's own sense; and I at least should have to do that, I think,
+even if your picture were painted with a more searching brush. For I
+should otherwise seem to forget what it is that my poetic and my appeal
+to experience rest upon. They rest upon _my_ measure of
+fulness--fulness of life and of the projection of it, which seems to you
+such an emptiness of both. I don't mean to say I don't wish I could do
+twenty things I can't--many of which you do so livingly; but I confess I
+ask myself what would become in that case of some of those to which I am
+most addicted and by which interest seems to me most beautifully
+producible. I hold that interest may be, _must_ be, exquisitely made and
+created, and that if we don't make it, we who undertake to, nobody and
+nothing will make it for us; though nothing is more possible, nothing
+may even be more certain, than that my quest of it, my constant wish to
+run it to earth, may entail the sacrifice of certain things that are not
+on the straight line of it. However, there are too many things to say,
+and I don't think your chapter is really inquiring enough to entitle you
+to expect all of them. The fine thing about the fictional form to me is
+that it opens such widely different windows of attention; but that is
+just why I like the window so to frame the play and the process!
+
+/*
+Faithfully yours,
+
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To H. G. Wells._
+
+/#
+ With reference to the following letter, Mr. Wells kindly allows me
+ to quote a passage from his answer, dated July 8, 1915, to the
+ preceding: " ...There is of course a real and very fundamental
+ difference in our innate and developed attitudes towards life and
+ literature. To you literature like painting is an end, to me
+ literature like architecture is a means, it has a use. Your view
+ was, I felt, altogether too prominent in the world of criticism and
+ I assailed it in lines of harsh antagonism. And writing that stuff
+ about you was the first escape I had from the obsession of this
+ war. _Boon_ is just a waste-paper basket. Some of it was written
+ before I left my home at Sandgate (1911), and it was while I was
+ turning over some old papers that I came upon it, found it
+ expressive, and went on with it last December. I had rather be
+ called a journalist than an artist, that is the essence of it, and
+ there was no other antagonist possible than yourself. But since it
+ was printed I have regretted a hundred times that I did not express
+ our profound and incurable difference and contrast with a better
+ grace...." In a further letter to Henry James, dated July 13, Mr.
+ Wells adds: "I don't clearly understand your concluding
+ phrases--which shews no doubt how completely they define our
+ difference. When you say 'it is art that _makes_ life, makes
+ interest, makes importance,' I can only read sense into it by
+ assuming that you are using 'art' for every conscious human
+ activity. I use the word for a research and attainment that is
+ technical and special...."
+#/
+
+
+_Dictated._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+July 10th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Wells,
+*/
+
+I am bound to tell you that I don't think your letter makes out any sort
+of case for the bad manners of "Boon," as far as your indulgence in them
+at the expense of your poor old H. J. is concerned--I say "your" simply
+because he has _been_ yours, in the most liberal, continual,
+sacrificial, the most admiring and abounding critical way, ever since he
+began to know your writings: as to which you have had copious testimony.
+Your comparison of the book to a waste-basket strikes me as the reverse
+of felicitous, for what one throws into that receptacle is exactly what
+one doesn't commit to publicity and make the affirmation of one's
+estimate of one's contemporaries by. I should liken it much rather to
+the preservative portfolio or drawer in which what is withheld from the
+basket is savingly laid away. Nor do I feel it anywhere evident that my
+"view of life and literature," or what you impute to me as such, is
+carrying everything before it and becoming a public menace--so unaware
+do I seem, on the contrary, that my products constitute an example in
+any measurable degree followed or a cause in any degree successfully
+pleaded: I can't but think that if this were the case I should find it
+somewhat attested in their circulation--which, alas, I have reached a
+very advanced age in the entirely defeated hope of. But I _have_ no view
+of life and literature, I maintain, other than that our form of the
+latter in especial is admirable exactly by its range and variety, its
+plasticity and liberality, its fairly living on the sincere and shifting
+experience of the individual practitioner. That is why I have always so
+admired your so free and strong application of it, the particular rich
+receptacle of intelligences and impressions emptied out with an energy
+of its own, that your genius constitutes; and _that_ is in particular
+why, in my letter of two or three days since I pronounced it curious and
+interesting that you should find the case I constitute myself only
+ridiculous and vacuous to the extent of your having to proclaim your
+sense of it. The curiosity and the interest, however, in this latter
+connection are of course for my mind those of the break of perception
+(perception of the veracity of _my_ variety) on the part of a talent so
+generally inquiring and apprehensive as yours. Of course for myself I
+live, live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it be,
+is in my own kind of expression of that. Therefore I am pulled up to
+wonder by the fact that for you my kind (my sort of sense of expression
+and sort of sense of life alike) doesn't exist; and that wonder is, I
+admit, a disconcerting comment on my idea of the various appreciability
+of our addiction to the novel and of all the personal and intellectual
+history, sympathy and curiosity, behind the given example of it. It is
+when that history and curiosity have been determined in the way most
+different from my own that I want to get at them--precisely _for_ the
+extension of life, which is the novel's best gift. But that is another
+matter. Meanwhile I absolutely dissent from the claim that there are any
+differences whatever in the amenability to art of forms of literature
+aesthetically determined, and hold your distinction between a form that
+is (like) painting and a form that is (like) architecture for wholly
+null and void. There is no sense in which architecture is aesthetically
+"for use" that doesn't leave any other art whatever exactly as much so;
+and so far from that of literature being irrelevant to the literary
+report upon life, and to its being made as interesting as possible, I
+regard it as relevant in a degree that leaves everything else behind. It
+is art that _makes_ life, makes interest, makes importance, for our
+consideration and application of these things, and I know of no
+substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. If I were
+Boon I should say that any pretence of such a substitute is helpless and
+hopeless humbug; but I wouldn't be Boon for the world, and am only yours
+faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Henry James, junior._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+July 20th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Harry,
+*/
+
+How can I sufficiently tell you how moved to gratitude and appreciation
+I am by your good letter of July 9th, just received, and the ready
+understanding and sympathy expressed in which are such a blessing to
+me! I did proceed, after writing to you, in the sense I then
+explained--the impulse and the current were simply irresistible; and the
+business has so happily developed that I this morning received, with
+your letter, the kindest possible one from the Home Secretary, Sir John
+Simon, I mean in the personal and private way, telling me that he has
+just decreed the issue of my certificate of Naturalisation, which will
+at once take effect. It will have thus been beautifully expedited, have
+"gone through" in five or six days from the time my papers were sent in,
+instead of the usual month or two. He gives me his blessing on the
+matter, and all is well. It will probably interest you to know that the
+indispensability of my step to myself has done nothing but grow since I
+made my application; like Martin Luther at Wittenberg "I could no
+other," and the relief of feeling corrected an essential falsity in my
+position (as determined by the War and what has happened since, also
+more particularly what has _not_ happened) is greater than I can say. I
+have testified to my long attachment here in the only way I
+could--though I certainly shouldn't have done it, under the inspiration
+of our Cause, if the U.S.A. had done it a little more _for_ me. Then I
+should have thrown myself back on that and been content with it; but as
+this, at the end of a year, hasn't taken place, I have had to act for
+myself, and I go so far as quite to think, I hope not fatuously, that I
+shall have set an example and shown a little something of the way. But
+enough--there it is!...
+
+/*
+Ever your affectionate old British Uncle,
+
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edmund Gosse._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+July 26th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Gosse,
+*/
+
+Your good letter makes me feel that you will be interested to know that
+since 4.30 this afternoon I have been able to say Civis Britannicus sum!
+My Certificate of Naturalisation was received by my Solicitor this a.m.,
+and a few hours ago I took the Oath of Allegiance, in his office, before
+a Commissioner. The odd thing is that nothing seems to have happened and
+that I don't feel a bit different; so that I see not at all how
+associated I have become, but that I was really too associated before
+for any nominal change to matter. The process has only shown me what I
+virtually was--so that it's rather disappointing in respect to acute
+sensation. I _haven't_ any, I blush to confess!...
+
+I thank you enormously for your confidential passage, which is most
+interesting and heartening.... And let me mention in exchange for your
+confidence that a friend told me this afternoon that he had been within
+a few days talking with ----, one of the American naval attaches,
+whose competence he ranks high and to whom he had put some question
+relative to the naval sense of the condition of these islands. To which
+the reply had been: "You may take it from me that England is absolutely
+impregnable and invincible"--and ---- repeated over--"impregnable
+and invincible!" Which kind of did me good.
+
+Let me come up and sit on your terrace some near August afternoon--I can
+always be rung up, you know: I _like_ it--and believe me yours and your
+wife's all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To John S. Sargent._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+July 30th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear John,
+*/
+
+I am delighted to hear from you that you are writing and sending to Mrs.
+Wharton in the good sense you mention. It will give her the greatest
+pleasure and count enormously for her undertaking.
+
+Yes, I daresay many Americans _will_ be shocked at my "step"; so many of
+them appear in these days to be shocked at everything that is not a
+reiterated blandishment and slobberation of Germany, with recalls of
+ancient "amity" and that sort of thing, by our Government. I waited long
+months, watch in hand, for the latter to show some sign of intermitting
+these amiabilities to such an enemy--the very smallest would have
+sufficed for me to throw myself back upon it. But it seemed never to
+come, and the misrepresentation of _my_ attitude becoming at last to me
+a thing no longer to be borne, I took action myself. It would really
+have been _so_ easy for the U.S. to have "kept" (if they had cared to!)
+yours all faithfully,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Wilfred Sheridan._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+Aug. 7th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest Wilfred,
+*/
+
+I have a brave letter from you which is too many days old--and the
+reason of that is that I became some fortnight ago a British subject.
+You may perhaps not have been aware that I wasn't one--it showed, I
+believe, so little; but I had in fact to do things, of no great
+elaboration, to take on the character and testify to my fond passion for
+the cause for which you are making so very much grander still a
+demonstration; so that now at any rate civis Britannicus sum, and
+there's no mistake about it. Well, the point is that this absolutely
+natural and inevitable offer of my allegiance--a poor thing but my
+own--and the amiable acceptance of it by the powers to which I applied,
+have drawn down on my devoted head an avalanche of letters, the
+friendliest and most welcoming, beneath which I still lie gasping. They
+have unspeakably touched and justified me, but I brush them all aside
+to-night, few of them as I have in proportion been able yet to answer,
+in order to tell you that their effect upon me all together isn't a
+patch on the pride and pleasure I have in hearing from _you_, and that I
+find your ability to write to me, and your sweet care to do so, in your
+fantastic conditions, the most wonderful and beautiful thing that has
+ever happened. Dear and delightful to me is the gallant good humour of
+your letter, which makes me take what you tell me as if I were quite
+monstrously near you. One doesn't know what to say or do in presence of
+the general and particular Irish perversity and unspeakability (as your
+vivid page reflects it;) that is, rather, nobody knows, to any good
+effect, but yourself--it makes _me_ so often ask if it isn't, when all's
+said and done and it has extorted the tribute of our grin, much more
+trouble than it's worth, or ever can be, and in short too, quite _too_,
+finally damning and discouraging. However, I am willing it should
+display its grace while you are there to give them, roundabout you, your
+exquisite care, and I can fall back on my sense of your rare psychologic
+intelligence. Your "Do write to me" goes to my heart, and your "I don't
+think the Russian affair as bad as it seems" goes to my head--even if it
+_now_ be seeming pretty bad to us here. But there's comfort in its
+having apparently cost the enemy, damn his soul to hell, enormously, and
+still being able to do so and to keep on leaving him not at all at his
+ease. I believe in that vast sturdy people quand meme--though heaven
+save us all from cheap optimism. I scarce know what to say to you about
+things "here," unless it be that I hold we are not really in the least
+such fools as we mostly seem bent on appearing to the world, and that on
+the day when we cease giving the most fantastic account of ourselves
+possible by tongue and pen, on _that_ day there will be fairly something
+the matter with us and we shall be false to our remarkably queer genius.
+Our genius is, and ever has been, to insist _urbi et orbi_ that we live
+by muddle, and by muddle only--while, all the while, our native
+character is never _really_ abjuring its stoutness or its capacity for
+action. We have been stout from the most ancient days, and are not a bit
+less so than ever--only we should do better if we didn't give so much
+time to writing to the papers that we are impossible and inexcusable.
+That is, or seems to be, queerly connected with our genius for being _at
+all_--so that at times I hope I shall never see it foregone: it's the
+mantle over which the country truly forges its confidence and acts out
+its faith. But the night wanes and the small hours are literally upon
+me--their smallness even diminishes. I am sticking to town, as you
+see--I find I don't yearn to eat my heart out, so to speak, all alone in
+the Sussex sequestration. So I keep lending my little house at Rye to
+friends and finding company in the mild hum of waterside Chelsea. The
+hum of London is mild altogether, and the drop of the profane life
+absolute--for I don't call the ceaseless and ubiquitous military
+footfall (not football!) profane, and all this quarter of the town
+simply bristles with soldiers and for the most part extremely
+good-looking ones. I really think we must be roping them in in much
+greater numbers than we allow when we write to the Times--otherwise I
+don't know what we mean by so many. Goodnight, my dear, dear boy. I hope
+you have harmonious news of Clare--her father has just welcomed me in
+the most genial way to the national fold. I haven't lately written to
+her, because in the conditions I have absolutely nothing to say to her
+but that I feel her to be in perfection the warrior's bride--and she
+knows that.
+
+/*
+Yours and hers, dearest Wilfred, all devotedly,
+
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Edmund Gosse._
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+August 25th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+My dear Gosse,
+*/
+
+I have had a bad sick week, mostly in bed--with putting pen to paper
+quite out of my power: otherwise I should sooner have thanked you for
+the so generous spirit of that letter, and told you, with emotion, how
+much it has touched me. I am really more overcome than I can say by
+your having been able to indulge in such freedom of mind and grace of
+speculation, during these dark days, on behalf of my poor old rather
+truncated edition, in fact entirely frustrated one--which has the
+grotesque likeness for me of a sort of miniature Ozymandias of Egypt
+("look on my _works_, ye mighty, and despair!")--round which the lone
+and level sands stretch further away than ever. It _is_ indeed
+consenting to be waved aside a little into what was once blest
+literature to so much as answer the question you are so handsomely
+impelled to make--but my very statement about the matter can only be,
+alas, a melancholy, a blighted confusion. That Edition has been, from
+the point of view of profit either to the publishers or to myself,
+practically a complete failure; vaguely speaking, it doesn't sell--that
+is, my annual report of what it does--the whole 24 vols.--in this
+country amounts to about L25 from the Macmillans; and the ditto from the
+Scribners in the U.S. to very little more. I am past all praying for
+anywhere; I remain at my age (which you know,) and after my long career,
+utterly, insurmountably, unsaleable. And the original preparation of
+that collective and selective series involved really the extremity of
+labour--all my "earlier" things--of which the Bostonians would have
+been, if included, one--were so intimately and interestingly revised.
+The edition is from that point of view really a monument (like
+Ozymandias) which has never had the least intelligent critical justice
+done it--or any sort of critical attention at all paid it--and the
+artistic problem involved in my scheme was a deep and exquisite one, and
+moreover was, as I held, very effectively solved. Only it took such
+time--_and_ such taste--in other words such aesthetic light. No more
+commercially thankless job of the literary order was (Prefaces and
+all--_they_ of a thanklessness!) accordingly ever achieved. The
+immediate inclusion of the Bostonians was rather deprecated by the
+publishers (the Scribners, who were very generally and in a high degree
+appreciative: I make no complaint of them at all!)--and there were
+reasons for which I also wanted to wait: we always meant that that work
+should eventually come in. Revision of it loomed peculiarly formidable
+and time-consuming (for intrinsic reasons,) and as other things were
+more pressing and more promptly feasible I allowed it to stand
+over--with the best intentions, and also in company with a small number
+more of provisional omissions. But by this time it _had_ stood over,
+disappointment had set in; the undertaking had begun to announce itself
+as a virtual failure, and we stopped short where we were--that is when a
+couple of dozen volumes were out. From that moment, some seven or eight
+years ago, nothing whatever has been added to the series--and there is
+little enough appearance now that there will ever. Your good impression
+of the Bostonians greatly moves me--the thing was no success whatever on
+publication in the Century (where it came out,) and the late R. W.
+Gilder, of that periodical, wrote me at the time that they had never
+published anything that appeared so little to interest their readers. I
+felt about it myself then that it was probably rather a remarkable feat
+of objectivity--but I never was very thoroughly happy about it, and seem
+to recall that I found the subject and the material, after I had got
+launched in it, under some illusion, less interesting and repaying than
+I had assumed it to be. All the same I _should_ have liked to review it
+for the Edition--it would have come out a much truer and more curious
+thing (it was meant to be curious from the first;) but there can be no
+question of that, or of the proportionate Preface to have been written
+with it, at present--or probably ever within my span of life. Apropos
+of which matters I at this moment hear from Heinemann that four or five
+of my books that he has have quite (entirely) ceased to sell and that he
+must break up the plates. Of course he must; I have nothing to say
+against it; and the things in question are mostly all in the Edition.
+But such is "success"! I should have liked to write that Preface to the
+Bostonians--which will never be written now. But think of noting now
+that _that_ is a thing that has perished!
+
+I am doing my best to feel better, and hope to go out this afternoon the
+first for several! I am exceedingly with you all over Philip's transfer
+to France. We are with each other now as not yet before over everything
+and I am yours and your wife's more than ever,
+
+/*
+H. J.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan._
+
+/#
+ Lieut. Wilfred Sheridan, Rifle Brigade, fell in action at Loos,
+ September 25, 1915.
+#/
+
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+October 4th, 1915.
+*/
+
+/*
+Dearest, dearest Clare,
+*/
+
+I have heard twice from your kindest of Fathers, and yet this goes to
+you (for poor baffling personal reasons) with a dreadful belatedness.
+The thought of coming into your presence, and into Mrs. Sheridan's, with
+such wretched empty and helpless hands is in itself paralysing; and yet,
+even as I say that, the sense of how my whole soul is full, even to its
+being racked and torn, of Wilfred's belovedest image and the splendour
+and devotion in which he is all radiantly wrapped and enshrined, [makes
+me] ask myself if I don't really bring you something, of a sort, in thus
+giving you the assurance of how absolutely I adored him! Yet who can
+give you anything that approaches your incomparable sense that he was
+yours, and you his, to the last possessed and possessing radiance of
+him? I can't pretend to utter to you words of "consolation"--vainest of
+dreams: for what is your suffering but the measure of his virtue, his
+charm and his beauty?--everything we so loved him for. But I see you
+marked with his glory too, and so intimately associated with his noble
+legend, with the light of it about you, and about his children, always,
+and the precious privilege of making him live again whenever one
+approaches you; convinced as I am that you will rise, in spite of the
+unspeakable laceration, to the greatness of all this and feel it carry
+you in a state of sublime privilege. I had sight and some sound of him
+during an hour of that last leave, just before he went off again; and
+what he made me then feel, and what his face seemed to say, amid that
+cluster of relatives in which I was the sole outsider (of which too I
+was extraordinarily proud,) is beyond all expression. I don't know why I
+presume to say such things--I mean poor things only of _mine_, to you,
+all stricken and shaken as you are--and then again I know how any touch
+of his noble humanity must be unspeakably dear to you, and that you'll
+go on getting the fragrance of them wherever he passed. I think with
+unutterable tenderness of those days of late last autumn when you were
+in the little house off the Edgware Road, and the humour and gaiety and
+vivid sympathy of his talk (about his then beginnings and conditions)
+made me hang spellbound on his lips. But what memories are these not to
+you, and how can one speak to you at all without stirring up the deeps?
+Well we are all in them _with_ you, and with his mother--and may I
+speak of his father?--and with his children, and we cling to you and
+cherish you as never before. I live with you in thought every step of
+the long way, and am yours, dearest Clare, all devotedly and sharingly,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+_To Hugh Walpole._
+
+/*
+21 Carlyle Mansions,
+Cheyne Walk, S.W.
+Nov. 13th, 1915.
+*/
+
+...I take to my heart these blest Cornish words from you and thank you
+for them as articulately as my poor old impaired state permits. It will
+be an immense thing to see you when your own conditions permit of it,
+and in that fond vision I hang on. I have been having a regular hell of
+a summer and autumn (that is more particularly from the end of July:)
+through the effect of a bad--an aggravated--heart-crisis, during the
+first weeks of which I lost valuable time by attributing (under wrong
+advice) my condition to mistaken causes; but I am in the best hands now
+and apparently responding very well to very helpful treatment. But the
+past year has made me feel twenty years older, and, frankly, as if my
+knell had rung. Still, I cultivate, I at least attempt, a brazen front.
+I shall not let that mask drop till I have heard _your_ thrilling story.
+Do intensely believe that I respond clutchingly to your every grasp of
+me, every touch, and would so gratefully be a re-connecting link with
+you here--where I don't wonder that you're bewildered. (It will be
+indeed, as far as I am concerned, the bewildered leading the
+bewildered.) I have "seen" very few people--I see as few as possible, I
+can't stand them, and all their promiscuous prattle, mostly; so that
+those who have reported of me to you must have been peculiarly
+vociferous. I deplore with all my heart your plague of boils and of
+insomnia; I haven't known the former, but the latter, alas, is my own
+actual portion. I think I shall know your rattle of the telephone as
+soon as ever I shall hear it. Heaven speed it, dearest Hugh, and keep me
+all fondestly yours,
+
+/*
+HENRY JAMES.
+*/
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+/*
+Abbey, Edwin, i. 88, 232; ii. 90, 186.
+
+Adams, Henry, letters to, i. 431;
+ ii. 360.
+
+Aide, Hamilton, ii. 59.
+
+Ainger, Canon, i. 177.
+
+Alexander, Sir George, i. 146.
+
+Allen, Miss Jessie, letters to, i. 379;
+ ii. 158.
+
+_Ambassadors, The_, i. 273, 354, 375-7, 413;
+ ii. 10, 245, 333.
+
+_American, The_, i. 47, 325; ii. 333. (dramatic version) i. 146, 161,
+ 166, 172-4, 176, 181, 185;
+ ii. 354.
+
+_American Scene, The_, ii. 4, 36, 45, 83.
+
+Andersen, Hendrik, ii. 74.
+
+Anderson, Miss Mary, _see_ Navarro, Mrs. A. F. de.
+
+Archer, William, i. 172, 176, 228.
+
+Arnold, Matthew, i. 125.
+
+_Aspern Papers, The_, i. 86.
+
+Asquith, Right Hon. H. H., ii. 460, 480, 481.
+
+_Awkward Age, The_, i. 273, 292, 317, 319, 325, 333, 334;
+ ii. 241.
+
+
+Bailey, John, letter to, ii. 269.
+
+Balestier, Wolcott, i. 148, 167, 186, 189.
+
+Balfour, Right Hon. A. J., ii. 49.
+
+Balfour, Graham, i. 386.
+
+Balzac, i. 327;
+ ii. 254, 350, 351.
+
+Barnard, Frederick, i. 88.
+
+Barres, Maurice, i. 221, 270.
+
+Bartholomew, A. T., ii. 127.
+
+Beardsley, Aubrey, ii. 343.
+
+Bell, Mrs. Hugh (Lady Bell), letters to, i. 173;
+ ii. 231.
+
+Bennett, Arnold, ii. 261, 262.
+
+Benson, Archbishop, i. 278.
+
+Benson, Arthur C., i. 217;
+ ii. 62, 112, 123.
+ Letters to, i. 240, 251, 262, 278;
+ ii. 125, 364.
+
+Bernstein, Henry, ii. 319-21, 357.
+
+Berry, Walter V. R., ii. 297, 425.
+ Letter to, ii. 217.
+
+_Better Sort, The_, i. 273.
+
+Bigelow, Mrs., letters to, ii. 159, 278.
+
+Biltmore, ii. 25.
+
+Bjoernson, i. 220, 221.
+
+Blanche, Jacques, ii. 108-10.
+
+Blandy, Mary, ii. 356, 371, 372.
+
+Blocqueville, Madame de, i. 46.
+
+Blowitz, i. 154.
+
+Bolt, Edward, ii. 75.
+
+Bonn, i. 5.
+
+Bonnard, Abel, ii. 357.
+
+Boott, Frank, i. 57, 98.
+
+Bosanquet, Miss T, letter to, ii. 204.
+
+_Bostonians, The_, i. 86, 115, 121, 135, 325;
+ ii. 98, 498.
+
+Boulogne-sur-mer, i. 5;
+ ii. 374.
+
+Bourget, Paul, i. 149, 154, 188, 195, 201, 205, 206, 230, 247, 274, 316;
+ ii. 56.
+ Letter to, i. 286.
+
+Bourget, Madame Paul, letters to, i. 292, 410.
+
+Boutroux, Emile, ii. 428.
+
+Braxfield, Lord Justice Clerk, ii. 372.
+
+Bridges, Robert, ii. 153, 337.
+ Letter to, ii. 341.
+
+Bright, John, i. 76.
+
+Brighton, ii. 61.
+
+Broadway, i. 88.
+
+Brooke, Rupert, ii. 127, 380, 462-5, 468, 472-4.
+
+Brooks, Cunliffe, i. 63.
+
+Broughton, Miss Rhoda, ii. 13, 59, 75, 331.
+ Letters to, ii. 178, 238, 317, 389, 408.
+
+Browne, Denis, ii. 474.
+
+Browning, Robert, i. 7;
+ ii. 234.
+
+Browning, Robert Barrett, i. 168, 169.
+
+Bryce, Viscount, ii. 381.
+
+Bryn Mawr, ii. 3, 27, 28, 53.
+
+Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, i. 125, 196, 307-9, 339, 340.
+
+Burton, Sir Richard, ii. 256.
+
+
+Cadwalader, John, ii. 82, 193.
+
+California, ii. 32-4.
+
+Cambon, Paul, i. 143.
+
+Cannan, Gilbert, ii. 324.
+
+Carlyle, Thomas, i. 122-4.
+
+Caro, E. M., i. 46.
+
+Chamberlain, Joseph, ii. 12.
+
+Chapman, R. W., letter to, ii. 241.
+
+Charmes, Xavier, i. 143.
+
+Charteris, Hon. Evan, letters to, ii. 436, 453.
+
+Chicago, ii. 31.
+
+Childe, Edward Lee, i. 50.
+ Letters to, ii. 10, 120.
+
+Chocorua (New Hampshire), ii. 2, 18, 134, 165.
+
+Clark, Sir John, i. 62.
+
+Clifford, Mrs. W. K., letters to, i. 381;
+ ii. 18, 29, 129, 171, 234, 392, 397.
+
+Colvin, Lady, _see_ Sitwell, Mrs.
+
+Colvin, Sir Sidney, i. 111, 133, 156, 160, 177, 188, 189, 191, 204, 223;
+ ii. 278.
+ Letters to, i. 224, 236, 330.
+
+Compton, Edward, i. 146, 166, 167, 172-4;
+ ii. 354.
+
+_Confidence_, i. 43, 69.
+
+Conrad, Joseph, i. 390, 405.
+
+Coppee, F., i. 154.
+
+Cory, William, i. 262.
+
+Cotes, Mrs Everard, letter to, i. 346.
+
+_Covering End_, i. 298, 299;
+ ii. 6.
+
+_Crapy Cornelia_, ii. 139.
+
+Crawford, Marion, i. 275, 319.
+
+Creighton, Bishop, ii. 275.
+
+Crewe, Marquis of, _see_ Houghton, Lord.
+
+Curtis, George, i. 197.
+
+Curtis, Mr. and Mrs. Daniel, i. 87, 127, 166, 168, 169, 378;
+ ii. 76.
+
+
+_Daisy Miller_, i. 43, 65, 66, 68, 92.
+
+Darwin, W. E., ii. 412.
+
+Darwin, Mrs. W. E., i. 257.
+
+Daudet, Alphonse, i. 41, 102-4, 154, 240, 241, 247, 269;
+ ii. 254.
+ Letter to, i. 108.
+
+_Death of the Lion, The_, i. 217.
+
+De Vere, Aubrey, i. 16.
+
+Dew-Smith, Mrs., letter to, ii. 55.
+
+Dickens, Charles, ii. 40, 138.
+
+Dickens, Miss, i. 16.
+
+Dino, Duchesse de, ii. 121.
+
+Dolben, Digby Mackworth, ii. 337-9, 341-3.
+
+Dore, Gustave, i. 45.
+
+Dostoieffsky, ii. 237.
+
+Dresden, i. 148, 186.
+
+Dublin Castle, i. 238, 239.
+
+Dublin, Royal Hospital, i. 238.
+
+Du Breuil, Jean, ii. 457, 465.
+
+Du Maurier, George, i. 143, 177.
+ Letters to, i. 98, 212.
+
+Dumas, Alexandre, ii. 410.
+
+
+Edwards, Miss M. Betham, letter to, ii. 213.
+
+Eliot, George, i. 42, 51, 61, 66; ii. 40, 284.
+
+Elliott, Miss Gertrude (Lady Forbes-Robertson), ii. 95.
+
+Emerson, R. W., i. 422; ii. 290.
+
+Emmet, Miss Ellen (Mrs. Blanchard Rand), letters to, ii. 107, 189.
+
+_English Hours_, ii. 101.
+
+Esher, Viscount, ii. 193.
+
+Etretat, i. 42;
+ ii. 257.
+
+_Europeans, The_, i. 43, 65, 66.
+
+
+Fawcett, E., i. 285.
+
+Fezandie, Institution (Paris), i. 4.
+
+Filippi, Filippo, ii. 75, 80.
+
+_Finer Grain, The_, ii. 139, 291.
+
+FitzGerald, Edward, i. 260.
+
+Flaubert, Gustave, i. 41, 42, 46, 49;
+ ii. 256, 258.
+
+Florence, i. 21, 24, 35-7, 43, 57, 127.
+
+Florida, ii. 26, 30.
+
+Forbes-Robertson, Sir. J., ii. 6, 96.
+
+Fox, Lazarus, i. 15.
+
+France, Anatole, i. 201;
+ ii. 277.
+
+Fullerton, W. Morton, ii. 156.
+
+
+Galton, Sir Douglas, i. 177.
+
+Gardner, Mrs. John L, i. 342;
+ ii. 17.
+ Letters to, i. 92, 238; ii. 195.
+
+Gautier, Theophile, i. 46;
+ ii. 410.
+
+Gay, Walter, ii. 414.
+
+Geneva, i. 139, 140.
+
+Gilder, R. W., ii. 498.
+
+Gilder, Mrs. R. W., letter to, ii. 401.
+
+Gissing, George, i. 390.
+
+Gladstone, W. E., i. 53, 96;
+ ii. 11.
+
+Glehn, Wilfred von, ii. 233.
+
+Godkin, E. L., i. 285, 377.
+
+_Golden Bowl, The_, i. 273;
+ ii. 10, 15, 28, 30, 41, 43, 209, 333.
+
+_Golden Dream, The_, i. 329.
+
+Goncourt Academy, the, ii. 62.
+
+Goncourt, Edmond de, i. 41, 102, 104, 154, 247;
+ ii. 260.
+
+Gordon, Lady Hamilton, i. 62.
+
+Gosse, Edmund, i. 138, 148, 251, 362;
+ ii. 85.
+ Reminiscences by, i. 88.
+ Letters to, i. 129, 172, 185, 202, 217, 220, 221, 223, 246,
+ 332, 344, 378, 385;
+ ii. 19, 24, 246, 248, 250, 252, 255, 257, 274, 348, 409,
+ 430, 480, 492, 496.
+
+Gosse, Mrs. Edmund, letter to, i. 201.
+
+Grainger, Percy, ii 233.
+
+Greville, Mrs., i. 66, 71, 80.
+
+Groombridge Place, i. 364.
+
+Grove, Mrs. Archibald, letter to, ii. 324.
+
+_Guy Domville_, i. 147, 149, 210, 226-9, 232-6.
+
+
+Haggard, Rider, i. 156.
+
+Haldane, Viscount, ii. 428.
+
+Hardy, Thomas, i. 190, 200;
+ ii. 108.
+
+Harland, Henry, i. 203, 217.
+
+Harrison, Frederic, ii. 204, 398.
+ Letter to, ii. 483.
+
+Harrison, Mrs. Frederic, letter to, ii. 202.
+
+Harvard, ii. 21, 153, 188.
+
+Harvey, Sir Paul, ii. 93, 122.
+ Letter to, ii. 47.
+
+_Hawthorne_ (English Men of Letters Series), i. 71, 72.
+
+Hay, John, i. 264, 407;
+ ii. 26.
+
+Heidelberg, i. 32.
+
+Henley, W. E, i. 386, 387.
+
+Hennessy, Mrs. Richard, ii. 135.
+
+Henschel, Sir George, letter to, i. 229
+
+Hewlett, Maurice, i. 345.
+
+_High Bid, The_, ii. 6, 90, 94, 96.
+
+Holland, Sidney, i. 63.
+
+Holmes, Wendell, i. 244, 295.
+
+Hosmer, B. G., i. 18.
+
+Houghton, Lord, i. 52, 53.
+
+Houghton, Lord (Marquis of Crewe), i. 238.
+
+Howells, W. D., i. 10, 14, 30, 60, 267.
+ Letters to, i. 33, 47, 71, 103, 134, 163, 197, 230, 277,
+ 291, 349, 354, 375, 397, 407, 413;
+ ii. 8, 98, 118, 221.
+
+Hueffer, Mrs. F. M., _see_ Hunt, Miss Violet.
+
+Hugo, Victor, i. 46.
+
+Humieres, Vicomte Robert d', ii. 78.
+
+Hunt, Miss Violet (Mrs. F. M. Hueffer), letter to, i. 424.
+
+Hunt, William, i. 5, 7.
+
+Hunter, Mrs. Charles, ii. 152, 195, 196, 208, 233, 320.
+ Letter to, ii. 170.
+
+Hunter, Mrs. George, letter to, i. 258.
+
+Huntington, Mrs., i. 23.
+
+Huntly, Marquis of, i. 63.
+
+Huxley, T. H., i. 52.
+
+
+Ibsen, i. 212.
+
+_International Episode, An_, i. 65, 67.
+
+Ireland, i. 121, 153, 216.
+
+Italy, i. 37, 43, 106, 126;
+ ii. 80, 439, 440.
+
+_Ivory Tower, The_, ii. 98, 154, 380.
+
+
+James, George Abbot, ii. 190, 196.
+ Letters to, ii. 110, 113.
+
+James, Henry: character and methods of work, i. xiii-xxxi:
+ birth and early years, i. 1-11:
+ visits to Europe, i. 11-14:
+ settles in Europe, i. 41:
+ life in London, i. 42-44, 84, 85, 87:
+ settles at Lamb House, Rye, i. 150, 151, 272-4:
+ revisits America, i. 276;
+ ii. 1-4:
+ last visit to America, ii. 152, 153:
+ settles in Chelsea, ii. 154:
+ seventieth birthday, ii. 154, 307-12:
+ naturalised as a British subject, ii. 381, 477-81, 491, 492:
+ last illness and death, ii. 381:
+ dramatic work, i. 144, 161-3, 166-8, 179-83, 206, 234, 235;
+ ii 6:
+ collected edition of his fiction, ii. 4, 70, 96, 98-100, 497-9:
+ impressions of England and the English, i. 21-3, 26, 27, 31, 42, 55, 58,
+ 64, 68, 69, 74, 84, 85, 87, 96, 114, 124;
+ ii. 377, 416, 417, 435, 443.
+
+James, Henry, senior, i. 1-3, 9, 27, 83, 92, 97, 98, 111, 112.
+ Letters to, i. 28, 32, 45.
+
+James, Mrs. Henry, senior (Miss Mary Walsh), i. 2, 82, 92;
+ ii. 47.
+ Letters to, i. 19, 21, 32, 38, 67, 76.
+
+James, Henry, junior, letters to, i. 309;
+ ii. 16, 96, 239, 288, 345, 385, 419, 477, 490.
+
+James, Miss Alice, i. 1, 13, 84, 86, 112, 120, 140, 143, 148, 187,
+ 189, 214-17.
+ Letters to, i. 15, 62, 166.
+
+James, Miss Margaret (Mrs. Bruce Porter), letters to, ii. 36, 53.
+
+James, Robertson, i. 1, 97;
+ ii. 152, 164.
+
+James, Wilkinson, i. 1, 6, 7, 9.
+
+James, William, i. 1-3, 5, 7, 9, 14, 42, 44, 84, 149, 275, 276, 295,
+ 305, 338, 339, 343, 344;
+ ii. 151, 152, 166-8, 300, 329, 330, 345.
+ Letters to, i. 24, 26, 50, 59, 65, 97, 102, 111, 115, 119, 139, 154,
+ 170, 179, 210, 214, 227, 232, 244, 280, 315, 371, 415;
+ ii. 34, 42, 50, 52, 82, 134, 140.
+
+James, Mrs. William, ii. 151, 152.
+ Letters to, i. 263, 301;
+ ii. 32, 194, 205, 299, 305, 329, 361, 449.
+
+James, William, junior, letters to, ii. 71, 314, 394.
+
+James, Mrs. William, junior, _see_ Runnells, Miss Alice.
+
+Jersey, Countess of, letter to, i. 192.
+
+Jones, Mrs. Cadwalader, letters to, i. 395, 401.
+
+Jusserand, J. J., i. 143;
+ ii. 26.
+
+
+Kemble, Mrs. Fanny, i. 67, 70, 83, 95, 128;
+ ii. 148.
+ Letter to, i. 78.
+
+Kempe, C. E., i. 254, 255.
+
+Keynes, Geoffrey, ii. 127.
+
+Kipling, Rudyard, i. 156, 178, 188, 189, 249, 271, 339, 341.
+
+
+_Lady Barbarina_, i. 103.
+
+La Farge, John, i. 402.
+
+Lamb House, Rye, description of, i. 265-7;
+ fire at, i. 312-14.
+
+Lang, Andrew, i. 138;
+ ii. 275-7.
+
+Langtry, Mrs., i. 63.
+
+Lapsley, Gaillard T., ii. 90, 110.
+ Letters to, i. 285, 391;
+ ii. 62, 92, 267.
+
+Lawrence, D. H., ii. 324.
+
+Leighton, Lord, i. 243.
+
+Lemaitre, Jules, ii. 413, 467.
+
+_Lesson of Balzac, The_, ii. 3, 27, 30.
+
+_Lesson of the Master, The_, i. 86, 192.
+
+Leverett, Rev. W. C., i. 7.
+
+Lewes, G. H., i. 61.
+
+Lincoln, Abraham, ii. 347, 348.
+
+_Little Tour in France, A_, i. 83.
+
+Lodge, Mrs. Henry Cabot, letter to, ii. 447.
+
+London, i. 42, 43, 54, 55, 59, 70, 74;
+ ii. 36, 37.
+
+Loti, Pierre, i. 202, 203, 325, 327.
+
+Lowell, James Russell, i. 13, 56, 75, 115, 184, 197.
+ Letter to, i. 118.
+
+Lubbock, Percy, letters to, i. 390;
+ ii. 310.
+
+Lushington, Miss, i. 54.
+
+Lyall, Sir Alfred, i. 177.
+
+Lydd, i. 362.
+
+
+Mackenzie, Compton, ii. 353.
+ Letters to, ii. 354, 437, 475.
+
+Mackenzie, Miss Muir, letters to, i. 283, 373, 382.
+
+McKinley, President, i. 249, 379.
+
+Malvern, Great, i. 26, 28.
+
+Marble, Manton, ii. 44, 83.
+
+Marsh, Edward, letters to, ii. 462, 464, 468, 472, 474.
+
+Martin, Sir Theodore, i. 177.
+
+Mathew, Lady, ii. 390.
+
+Mathews, Mrs. Frank, letter to, i. 406.
+
+Maupassant, Guy de, i. 41;
+ ii. 256-60.
+
+Meilhac, i. 154.
+
+Mentmore, i. 76.
+
+Meredith, George, i. 219, 241;
+ ii. 249-57, 438.
+
+_Middle Years, The_, i. 1, 65;
+ ii. 36, 380.
+
+Milan, i. 78, 122.
+
+Millais, Sir J. E., i. 76.
+
+Millet, Frank, i. 88, 314.
+
+Montegut, Emile de, i. 46.
+
+Morley, John, Viscount, i. 52, 53, 372;
+ ii. 11, 251.
+
+Morris, William, i. 16-19, 340, 341.
+
+Morris, Mrs. William, i. 17, 18, 80.
+
+Morse, Miss Frances R., letters to, i. 255, 294.
+
+Munich, i. 32;
+ ii. 142, 143, 244.
+
+Musset, Alfred de, i. 8;
+ ii. 156, 157.
+
+Myers, F. W. H., i. 371.
+ Letter to, i. 300.
+
+
+Naples, i. 43.
+
+Nauheim, ii. 152, 163.
+
+Navarro, A. F. de, letters to, i. 311, 348, 364, 368;
+ ii. 286.
+
+Navarro, Mrs. A. F. de (Miss Mary Anderson), letter to, i. 328.
+
+New England, ii. 19, 20, 135.
+
+_New Novel, The_, ii. 350.
+
+New York, i. 99; ii. 23, 25.
+
+Newport, i. 5-9.
+
+Norris, W. E, i. 218;
+ ii. 239, 319.
+ Letters to, i. 242, 250, 361, 366, 425;
+ ii. 12, 22, 45, 58, 84, 87, 114, 160, 173, 211.
+
+Norton, Charles Eliot, i. 10-12, 15, 353;
+ ii. 69, 118, 119, 295.
+ Letters to, i. 30, 74, 91, 122, 183, 193, 306, 337.
+
+Norton, Miss Elizabeth, letter to, ii. 441.
+
+Norton, Miss Grace, letters to, i. 35, 54, 56, 69, 93, 100, 113, 126, 268;
+ ii. 67, 131, 165, 293 412, 431.
+
+Norton, Richard, ii. 380, 412, 431-3.
+
+_Notes of a Son and Brother_, i. 1;
+ ii. 152, 290, 345, 360, 402.
+
+_Notes on Novelists_, ii. 118, 153, 227, 234, 350, 409.
+
+
+Oberammergau, i. 166, 169.
+
+Ohnet, Georges, ii. 467.
+
+Ortmans, F., i. 247.
+
+Osbourne, Lloyd, i. 175, 176, 183, 201.
+
+Osterley, i. 192, 193.
+
+_Other House, The_, i. 251;
+ ii. 6, 129, 131.
+
+_Outcry, The_, ii. 6, 129, 183, 202, 209, 214, 280, 291.
+
+Oxford, ii. 153, 188, 243.
+
+Oxford and Cambridge boat-race, i. 53.
+
+
+Paget, Sir James, i. 177.
+
+Palgrave, Miss Gwenllian, letter to, ii. 81.
+
+Paris, i. 41, 43, 48, 51, 57, 149, 154;
+ ii. 5, 85, 86.
+
+Parsons, Alfred, i. 88, 266.
+
+_Partial Portraits_, i. 98, 110, 130.
+
+_Passionate Pilgrim, A_, i. 12.
+
+Pater, Walter, i. 221, 222.
+
+Peabody, Miss, i. 115-17.
+
+Pell, Duncan, i. 6.
+
+Perry, Thomas Sergeant, reminiscences by, i. 6-9.
+ Letters to, ii. 61, 146, 167, 367, 416, 459.
+
+Perry, Mrs. T. S., letters to, ii. 406, 427.
+
+Philadelphia, ii. 25, 26.
+
+Phillips, Sir Claude, letter to, ii. 376
+
+Pinker, J. B., letters to, ii. 15, 105, 482.
+
+Playden, i. 150.
+
+Pollock, Sir Frederick, i. 70.
+
+Porter, Bruce, letters to, ii. 65, 164, 302.
+
+Porter, Mrs. Bruce, _see_ James, Miss Margaret.
+
+_Portrait of a Lady, The_, i. 44, 132, 279;
+ ii. 333.
+
+_Portraits of Places_, i. 378.
+
+Powell, George E. J., ii. 257.
+
+Prevost, Marcel i. 220.
+
+Primoli, Giuseppe, i. 239.
+
+_Princess Casamassima, The_, i. 86, 135, 325;
+ ii. 333.
+
+Procter, Mrs., i. 131.
+
+Prothero, George W., letter to, ii. 469.
+
+Prothero, Mrs. G. W., letters to, ii. 313, 332.
+
+Proust, Marcel, ii. 357.
+
+
+_Question of Our Speech, The_, ii. 3, 35.
+
+Quilter, Roger, ii. 233.
+
+
+Raffalovich, Andre, letter to, ii. 343.
+
+Rand, Mrs. Blanchard, _see_ Emmet, Miss Ellen.
+
+Redesdale, Lord, ii. 249.
+
+Renan, Ernest, i. 7.
+
+Repplier, Miss Agnes, ii. 26, 28.
+
+Reubell, Miss Henrietta, letters to, i. 90, 225, 333;
+ ii. 139.
+
+_Reverberator, The_, i. 86.
+
+Rheims, ii. 405, 407, 415.
+
+Richmond, Bruce L., letter to, ii. 350.
+
+Ritchie, Lady, letter to, ii. 304.
+
+Rochette, Institution (Geneva), i. 5.
+
+_Roderick Hudson_, i. 14, 41, 132;
+ ii. 55, 333.
+
+Rome, i. 24, 25, 43, 56, 57;
+ ii. 74, 79, 80, 100, 101.
+
+Roosevelt, President, i. 379;
+ ii. 273, 449.
+
+Rosebery, Earl of, i. 77.
+
+Rossetti, D. G., i. 18;
+ ii. 295.
+
+Rostand, Edmond, i. 349, 368, 369.
+
+Roughead, William, letters to, ii. 327, 356, 371, 373.
+
+Runnells, Miss Alice (Mrs. William James, junior), letter to, ii. 201.
+
+Ruskin, John, i. 7, 16, 20.
+
+Rye, i. 150, 245, 261, 262, 264-7, 272-6;
+ ii. 4-7.
+
+
+_Sacred Fount, The_, i. 273, 356, 408, 409.
+
+St. Augustine (U. S. A.), ii. 27.
+
+St. Gaudens, A., i. 255, 257, 259.
+
+San Francisco, earthquake at, ii. 50, 52, 65.
+
+San Gimignano, i. 195.
+
+Sand, George, i. 51;
+ ii. 56, 157, 227, 228, 350, 351, 375, 387, 410.
+
+Sands, Mrs. Mahlon, letter to, i. 186.
+
+Sargent, John S., i. 88, 102, 334;
+ ii. 154, 233, 309, 316, 318, 348, 359, 366, 368, 437.
+ Letter to, ii. 493.
+
+Saunders, T. Bailey, letters to, ii. 155, 186.
+
+Saxmundham, i. 260.
+
+Sayle, Charles, letter to, ii. 127.
+
+Schopenhauer, i. 7.
+
+Scott, Clement, i. 228.
+
+Sedgwick, Arthur, i. 30.
+
+_Sense of the Past, The_, i. 349, 352, 355;
+ ii. 380, 425.
+
+Serao, Mathilde, i. 292.
+
+Shakespeare, William, i. 424;
+ ii. 62, 164.
+
+Sheridan, Wilfred, letters to, ii. 215, 470, 494.
+
+Sheridan, Mrs. Wilfred, letters to, ii. 199, 499.
+
+_Siege of London, The_, ii. 119.
+
+Siena, i. 149, 193-6.
+
+Simon, Sir John, ii. 491.
+
+Sitwell, Mrs. (Lady Colvin), i. 152, 177, 200.
+
+_Small Boy and Others, A_, i. 2;
+ ii. 153, 205, 289, 307-9.
+
+Smalley, G. W., i. 242, 243, 281.
+
+Smith, Goldwin, i. 52.
+
+Smith, Logan Pearsall, letter to, ii. 337.
+
+Smith, Miss Madeleine Hamilton, ii. 373, 374.
+
+_Soft Side, The_, i. 273.
+
+Spencer, Herbert, i. 60, 61.
+
+_Spoils of Poynton, The_, i. 149, 150, 246, 408.
+
+Stephen, Sir James, i. 177.
+
+Stephen, Sir Leslie, i. 16, 218, 270.
+
+Stevenson, Robert Louis, i. 86, 120, 129, 139, 217, 219, 223-5, 236,
+ 237, 330-2, 386, 387; ii. 237, 371.
+ Letters to, i. 110, 130, 132, 136, 152, 155, 158, 174, 181, 188,
+ 190, 199, 204, 207.
+
+Stevenson, Mrs. R. L., i. 394;
+ ii. 66, 303.
+
+Story, William Wetmore, i. 13, 274, 411-13, 431.
+
+Story, Mrs. Waldo, letter to, i. 411.
+
+Strasbourg, i. 33.
+
+Sturges, Jonathan, i. 304, 313, 331, 334, 376.
+ Letter to, i. 248.
+
+Sturgis, Howard O., ii. 200, 267, 456.
+ Letters to, i. 317, 428;
+ ii. 72, 74, 192, 330, 382.
+
+Sturgis, Julian R., letter to, i. 212.
+
+Sturgis, Mrs. J. R., letter to, ii. 14.
+
+Sutro, Mrs. Alfred, letters to, ii. 319, 375, 387.
+
+Swedenborg, i. 3.
+
+Swinburne, A. C., ii. 246, 248, 249, 255-7, 275.
+
+Swynnerton, Mrs., ii. 194, 195.
+
+Symonds, John Addington, i. 378.
+ Letter to, i. 106.
+
+Syracuse (N. Y.), i. 84.
+
+
+Taine, H., ii. 226, 245.
+
+Talleyrand, ii. 122.
+
+Temple, Miss Mary, i. 26;
+ ii. 361, 362, 402.
+
+Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, i. 53, 66.
+
+Terry, Miss Marion, i. 146, 235.
+
+Thackeray, W. M., ii. 39, 40.
+
+_Theatricals_, i. 147.
+
+Titian, i. 20.
+
+Tolstoy, i. 327;
+ ii. 237, 324.
+
+_Tragic Muse, The_, i. 87, 136, 161, 163, 183, 325;
+ ii. 333.
+
+_Transatlantic Sketches_, i. 13, 14.
+
+Trevelyan, Sir George O., letter to, i. 432.
+
+Turgenev, Ivan, i. 41, 42, 45, 46, 49, 85.
+
+_Turn of the Screw, The_, i. 278, 279, 296, 298, 300, 408.
+
+
+Vallombrosa, i. 171;
+ ii. 5, 75, 81.
+
+Vanderbilt, George, i. 256;
+ ii. 25.
+
+_Velvet Glove, The_, ii. 5.
+
+Venice, i. 87, 168;
+ ii. 5, 76, 77, 81.
+
+Vernon, Miss Anna, i. 21.
+
+Viardot, Madame, i. 45.
+
+Victoria, Queen, i. 372.
+
+Vincent, Mrs. Dacre, letter to, ii. 434.
+
+Voguee, Vicomte Melchior de, i. 316.
+
+
+Wagniere, Madame, letters to, ii. 76, 144.
+
+Waldstein, Dr. Louis, letter to, i. 296.
+
+Walpole, Hugh, ii. 125, 126, 173.
+ Letters to, ii. 112, 122, 236, 244, 322, 352, 423, 444, 501.
+
+Walsh, Miss Mary, _see_ James, Mrs. Henry, senior.
+
+Walsh, Miss Katharine, i. 2, 13, 97, 143.
+
+War, American Civil, i. 9;
+ ii. 401.
+
+War, European, ii. 379 to end, _passim_.
+
+War, South African, i. 331, 341, 342, 348.
+
+War, Spanish-American, i. 280, 292.
+
+Ward, Mrs. Humphry, letters to, i. 187, 318, 320, 323;
+ ii. 264, 265, 366.
+
+Warren, Edward, letters to, i. 261, 315;
+ ii. 31.
+
+Warren, Sir T. Herbert, letter to, ii. 188.
+
+Washington, i. 91.
+
+_Washington Square_, i. 43, 71.
+
+_Watch and Ward_, i. 12.
+
+Wells, H. G., ii. 44, 249, 266.
+ Letters to, i. 298, 335, 388, 400, 404;
+ ii, 37, 137, 180, 229, 261, 333, 485, 487.
+
+Wharton, Mrs., i. 395, 396, 402;
+ ii. 5, 35, 97, 117, 118, 266, 320, 411.
+ Letters to, ii, 56, 78, 90, 94, 104, 123, 142, 156,
+ 161, 163, 168, 175, 197, 208, 227, 281, 357, 369, 391,
+ 399, 403, 405, 414, 425, 452, 456, 465.
+
+_What Maisie Knew_, i. 150, 290, 293, 325, 408.
+
+Wheeler, C. E., letter to, ii. 183.
+
+White, Dr. J. W., letters to, ii. 88, 184, 272, 358.
+
+White, Mrs. Henry, letters to, ii. 117, 296.
+
+Wilde, Oscar, i. 228, 233.
+
+Wilson, President, ii. 301, 443, 469.
+
+_Wings of the Dove, The_, i. 87, 273, 399, 402, 405, 407, 408;
+ ii. 333.
+
+Wister, Owen, letter to, ii. 148.
+
+_Within the Rim_, ii. 380, 441, 482.
+
+Witt, Robert C., letter to, ii. 280.
+
+Wolff, Albert, i. 154.
+
+Wolseley, Viscount, i. 238.
+
+Wolseley, Viscountess, i. 239.
+ Letters to, i. 254, 369.
+
+Wood, Derwent, ii. 154, 348.
+
+Woolson, Miss C. F., i. 105.
+
+Worcester, i. 28.
+
+Wright, C. Hagberg, letter to, ii. 339.
+
+
+Young, Filson, ii. 235.
+
+Young, Stark, ii. 332.
+
+
+Zola, Emile, i. 41, 49, 50, 103-5, 160, 164, 209, 219.
+*/
+
+ * * * * *
+
+Alterations/corrections made by the etext transcriber:
+
+anl conversible=>and conversible
+
+the Tyrol etc,=>the Tyrol etc.,
+
+the Germans will he "here"=>the Germans will be "here"
+
+crime ever perpetrated againt=>crime ever perpetrated against
+
+overestrained by it as to hurt=>overstrained by it as to hurt
+
+magnanimusly forgotten it a little=>magnanimously forgotten it a little
+
+night a a young ex-postman from Rye=>night a young ex-postman from Rye
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Letters of Henry James, Vol. II, by Henry James
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LETTERS OF HENRY JAMES, V.2 ***
+
+***** This file should be named 38035.txt or 38035.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+ http://www.gutenberg.org/3/8/0/3/38035/
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+ the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+ you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is
+ owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+ has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+ Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments
+ must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+ prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+ returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+ sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+ address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+ the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+ you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+ does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+ License. You must require such a user to return or
+ destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+ and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+ Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+ money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+ electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+ of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+ distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+ Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+ Chief Executive and Director
+ gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+ http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
generated by cgit v1.2.3 (git 2.25.1) at 2026-07-01 21:35:02 +0000